Atomic bomb survivor Shigeaki Mori, who spent decades studying forgotten American prisoners of war from the Hiroshima attack, has died aged 88.
According to Japanese media reports, the historian died in a hospital in Hiroshima on March 14.
Sen was only eight years old when B-29 bombers carrying the earth-shattering “Little Boy” bombs landed in the city. Less than a mile and a half from the center of the blast, Sen was thrown into a nearby creek to protect him from the ensuing fire.
“I found myself in a mushroom cloud,” Sen later wrote. “It was so dark that when I raised my hands about 10 centimeters in front of my face, I couldn’t see them.”
Over the next few days, Sen searched for food and water but found only piles of charred bodies. When he found the water, it was contaminated with radiation. Unconsciously, Sen drank it anyway.
As a young man, Mori worked at a brokerage firm and later at a piano manufacturer. “But I always wanted to be a historian,” he told The New York Times in 2016.
So the budding historian began spending his weekends researching the aftermath of the Aug. 6, 1945, bombing. Mori personally interviewed survivors and carefully checked official histories and contemporary newspaper reports.
“There are a lot of mistakes in history,” he told The Times.
However, an interview with a local university professor launched Minoru Mori on a decades-long quest. The professor found a list of names in a government archive but was unsure what to do with them, so he gave them to Sen.
The list contains the names of 12 American pilots shot down over the area on July 28, 1945. They were killed along with the Japanese when their fellow Americans dropped bombs. Their deaths were unknown, and both governments remained silent about their presence in the city.
“When I first learned about the victims in the United States, I realized that none of them were officially recognized as atomic bomb victims. That shocked me,” Mori told Stars and Stripes in 2015.
It took him three years to find anyone with ties to the Americans.
Finally, in the 1970s, declassified U.S. documents supported his findings. His follow-up book, The Secret History of American Soldiers Died by the Atomic Bomb, details the fate of the pilots.
Mr. Mori worked tirelessly to expose the deaths of Americans—building a monument to them at his own expense and advocating for their inclusion in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. In 2004, the first pilot’s name was included on the Peace Memorial; 11 more were added in 2009.
In 2016, Mori was recognized by former President Barack Obama, the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima. The pair’s subsequent embrace at the memorial site attracted international attention.
“My ultimate hope is to send a message that war robs people of everything,” Mori told Stars and Stripes in 2008. “We should never repeat that mistake.”