On Nov. 23, 2024, JoAnn Blatchley, president of the Saint Paul-Nagasaki Sister City Committee, and I visited the Peace Garden in Lyndale Park in Minneapolis. Blatchley is a retired teacher and peace activist. As we entered the Peace Garden, she said, “This is where everything started.” She was talking about her entry into peace activism…

On Sept. 27, 2024, I participated in a tour, organized by the Department of Energy, of the Hanford Site’s B-Reactor, the world’s first plutonium production reactor of this scale. The tour group met at the Hanford Visitor Center in Richland, WA, and traveled by bus to the Hanford Site. Our tour guide was a nuclear…

日本語版は下をご覧ください。 On Sunday, November 3rd, I attended a special concert of the Nagasaki Symphony Orchestra, a civic orchestra originally founded in 1970 with the support of Nagasaki Prefecture and Nagasaki City to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the opening of the Port of Nagasaki. In the same year, Nagasaki City commissioned renowned composer Dan Ikuma…

日本語版は下をご覧ください。 The wonderful news of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese national organization of hibakusha, or survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reached me while I was with Archbishop Emeritus Takami Mitsuaki, an in utero survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki, on the evening of Oct…

How to Find Hope in the Midst of Increasing Danger The Doomsday Clock, published annually by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has been set at 90 seconds to midnight since 2023. This clock, in which “midnight” symbolizes the end of the world as we know it, has served as a powerful reminder of the…