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Hiroshima Humanitarian, Shigeaki Mori.
In Hiroshima, Japan, late in World War II, Shigeaki Mori was an 8-year-old boy walking across a bridge with his friend when on the morning of August 6th, 1945, an enormous blast blew them off the bridge, into the creek below.
The blinding light and then hurricane force winds they were struck by, were caused by an atomic bomb, the first nuclear weapon the world had ever seen.
This weapon of unprecedented destructive power was called "Little Boy," dropped from 31,000 feet in the air by a B-29 bomber known as the "Enola Gay." It killed an estimated 140,000 people, many at once, many more in the months ahead, from radiation poisoning.
Among the dead was Mr. Mori's little friend.
But there was also another secret the U.S. military did not reveal, one Mr. Mori would later reveal for them.
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In Japan, the war left long-term emotional scars, fostering widespread bitterness. But not for Mr. Mori. He recognized our shared humanity and sought peaceful solutions.
30-years after the war, while reading Japanese government documents, Mr. Mori discovered that 12 American prisoners of war, held in Hiroshima, were also killed by the bomb blast.
This was something the U.S. military had never revealed.
Over the next 40-years, Mr. Mori examined Japanese and American records, and began making contact with their families, in English, to explain what had happened to their loved ones.
And he convinced Japanese government officials to place a memorial plaque on the site of their Hiroshima prison, to honor the Americans who died there.
In 2016, when President Barak Obama, became the first U.S. leader to visit Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, he recognized Mr. Mori as "the man who sought out families of Americans killed here because he believed their loss was equal to his own."
President Obama and Mr. Mori shared an emotional embrace.
Mr. Mori, who passed away at 88 on March 14, 2026, summed up his life's work in these words: "My research was not about people from an enemy country. It was about human beings."
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