page_title: Setsuko Thurlow
section_title: Anti-nuclear activism
hierarchical_section_title: Setsuko Thurlow / Anti-nuclear activism
caption_attribution_description: This boat labeled "Peace Boat" went by the window on Thursday. I had no idea what it was, but here's what I found on their web site: Peace Boat is a Japan-based international non-governmental and non-profit organization that works to promote peace, human rights, equal and sustainable development and respect for the environment. Peace Boat seeks to create awareness and action based on effecting positive social and political change in the world. We pursue this through the organization of global educational programmes, responsible travel, cooperative projects and advocacy activities. These activities are carried out on a partnership basis with other civil society organizations and communities in Japan, Northeast Asia, and around the world. Peace Boat carries out its main activities through a chartered passenger ship that travels the world on peace voyages. The ship creates a neutral, mobile space and enables people to engage across borders in dialogue and mutual cooperation at sea, and in the ports that we visit. Activities based on Japan and Northeast Asia are carried out from our eight Peace Centers in Japan.
context_page_description: Setsuko Thurlow, born Setsuko Nakamura, is a Japanese–Canadian nuclear disarmament campaigner and Hibakusha who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. She is mostly known throughout the world for being a leading figure of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons and to have given the acceptance speech for its reception of the 2017 Nobel peace prize.
context_section_description: Setsuko Thurlow's activism began after March 1, 1954, after the explosion of the hydrogen bomb of the code name "Castle Bravo" in the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands which had nuclear fallout until Japan. This American weapon was approximately one thousand times more powerful than the one she had been victim of less than 10 years before. This event happened the first week she had arrived in the USA and she gave her opinion on that. During her studying years in the USA, she has described receiving threats and aggressions linked to her criticism of the use of the nuclear bomb by the American army, to the point where she could not go to class anymore and had to live at one of her professor's house.
  She is a member of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese confederation of A and H Bombs sufferers formed in 1956, who fought for hibakushas medical rights and social recognition.
  In 1974, profoundly worried by the fact that the public tended to forget and underestimate the devastating impacts of nuclear bombs, she founded the foundation Hiroshima Nagasaki Relived. The organisation mobilised professors, artists, lawyers and teachers to inform and raise public awareness to the consequences of nuclear weapons.
  She has since travelled in dozens of countries to testify as a hibakusha and raise alert to the existential threat of nuclear weapons, in front of high dignitaries such as Pope John Paul II as much as school students. She has several times been a crew member of the Peace Boat, a Japanese NGO promoting nuclear disarmement.
  She has participated in several school presentations as a member of the project "Hibakusha stories" based in New-York, to testify before all-together several thousands of students.
  She has been regularly invited to testify at universities, schools, nuclear and Japanese history centres and other public events.
  Thurlow is also an activist against the peaceful use of nuclear energy due to its existential dangers and has been particularly active as a critic with other hibakushas after the Fukushima humanitarian catastrophe.
caption: The Peace Boat in New York City
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