This Week’s Column
Vox Populi, The Asahi Shimbun, August 15, 2026
Young people of 19 and 20, only recently enrolled at university, go to hear about the wartime experiences of former students from the same university. In 1998, Keio University offered a class built around just such an experience, later recorded in a book titled Our Seniors Went to War. ▼
The students wrote honestly about how they felt. “What a hassle.” “I’m sick and tired of hearing about war.” Reluctant and nervous, 89 students set out to visit their older predecessors. ▼
One 80-year-old man had been writing down his overflowing memories of the war, although he had never intended to show them to anyone. When a 20-year-old student came to see him, he handed over a stack of papers and said, “You are the first person to read this.” Others they met included a man whose war ended just before he was to board a Kaiten, a manned suicide torpedo, and another who spent time as a prisoner in Java while carrying the remains of his younger brother, who had died there from illness. ▼
Horrific experiences were recounted calmly, sometimes even with jokes. The students were bewildered at first, but gradually came to understand that this was simply what it had meant to live through wartime. Then one “why” after another began to arise. Why had people not resisted militarism? Why had they continued to fight when they knew they were going to lose? By the time the interviews were over, the students had begun to receive the war not merely as history, but as something that shook them deeply. ▼
Twenty-eight years have passed since that class. Those students are now in their late 40s, and many of the people they interviewed have passed away. Yet the memories that were handed down after half a century will surely continue to offer clues for thinking about war. ▼
Today, roughly 90 percent of Japan’s population was born after the war. What does it mean to kill another person, to be killed, or to die of hunger? When there is no longer anyone left who can speak from personal experience, what will keep hollow words and rash actions in check?
These are the questions that come to mind on this, the 81st anniversary of the end of the war.
Reference Column
Vox Populi, The Asahi Shimbun, August 9, 2026
Peace education begins with teaching children about the world as it is today. That is the conviction of Takeshi Yamakawa, 89, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki who spent many years as an elementary school teacher. If children learn about the present, he believes, a “why” will arise in their minds. When they search for an answer, they begin to think about the past. Their thoughts will then turn toward the future as well. ▼
“Children are always the ones who teach me,” he says. Looking back, he says the turning point came from a survey of elementary and junior high school students conducted 25 years after the war. Asked from whom they learned about the war and the atomic bombings, the fewest students answered, “teachers.” He was shocked. ▼
Standing in front of his class, Yamakawa began telling his students about his own experience of the atomic bombing when he was eight years old. “I became conscious of myself as a teacher who was also a hibakusha,” he recalls. He was subjected to unfair criticism, including accusations that he was providing biased education. There was pressure as well. ▼
The word he dislikes most is “political.”
“If someone says, ‘Isn’t that political?’ that one remark can crush you completely.”
He has long felt that those in power have been sending a message to educators: Do not touch politics. ▼
The significance of peace education is now being questioned once again. During a school trip by Doshisha International High School, two boats carrying students capsized off Henoko, Okinawa, killing a student and a boat captain. The captain was also a pastor who had long participated in protests against the relocation of a U.S. Marine Corps base to Henoko and had been involved in the school’s peace-study program.
The Ministry of Education determined that the school’s peace studies program violated the principle of political neutrality.
But what does neutrality mean? Should the government of the day be the one to decide?
Yamakawa and groups representing atomic bomb survivors argue that this is a distraction from the real issue. ▼
The “whys” that arise in children’s minds often lead to enormous, almost monstrous questions.
Why do adults wage war?
Yamakawa cannot answer that question either. But he does not give up.
Because he still believes in human beings.
Today marks 81 years since the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.