Nagasaki Day 2024: Worthing Peace Group hangs paper cranes to commemorate atomic bombings in Japan

Members marked Nagasaki Day at the Worthing Peace Tree in Homefield Park on the morning of August 9, 79 years to the day since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Organiser Pauline Fraser read out the 2024 Nagasaki Peace Declaration, which had been made by the mayor of Nagasaki in Japan eight hours earlier.

She also read out a letter she had signed to the Worthing West MP Dr Beccy Cooper, asking her to call on the government to engage with the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. A similar letter will be sent to East Worthing and Shoreham MP Tom Rutland.

Former Worthing mayor Jon Roser offered to work with the group on a motion to put to the borough council, asking for the treaty to be officially endorsed locally.

The first nuclear bomb was dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Three days later, another was dropped on Nagasaki.

Retired priest David Mumford read the memories of John Dorward, an eyewitness to the devastation. A Church of Scotland minister from Galashiels, John was interned by the Japanese after Pearl Harbour and sent to a Polish monastery in Nagasaki, so he was there when the bomb dropped.

David said: "It was about midday on the 9th of August. Nagasaki was one of the first places where Christianity came to Japan and the Catholic cathedral was in the centre of the town. It was in fact while mass was being celebrated on the Feast of the Transfiguration that the nuclear bomb was dropped."

He explained that John's task was to look after the monastery cow and that meant he was out in the countryside when the bomb dropped.

John wrote: "It was a single plane in the sky and then a light, terrifying in its intensity, which so filled my mind that I had no sense of the explosion afterwards and when I got up, the first thing that I saw was the mushroom cloud.

"Now, there was a low hill between the monastery and Nagasaki which shielded me from the blast. Looking one way, there seemed little difference, and looking the other was a scene of utter devastation.

"We were deeply distressed as we found that our cook, who had been friendly, had been in the city that lunchtime and had never returned. We never saw him again."

David said that a month later, in September 1945, John walked through Nagasaki. The outskirts of the city were burned black with the occasional chimney still standing but the centre was fused into a brick red mass.To honour the victims, members hung paper cranes around the peace tree.

Sylvia Knight explained paper cranes are used as a symbol of peace in tribute to a Japanese girl who was a victim of the atomic bombings.

Sadako Sasaki was two when the atomic bombs were dropped and she folded more than a thousand origami cranes over the next ten years, before she died aged 12 from leukaemia.