ICAN to Offer Online Tours of A-Bomb Museums in Japan

Hiroshima, July 21 (Jiji Press)--The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, will conduct online tours to introduce museums on the U.S. atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II. The virtual tours organized by the nongovernmental organization, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, will take place for about 30 minutes each for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. The tours will start at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday Japan time (9:30 a.m. GMT) for the former and at 8 a.m. Friday for the latter. Hiroshima, western Japan, was flattened by a U.S. atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. Nagasaki, southwestern Japan, suffered the same fate three days later. The virtual tours are designed to help people around the world see the reality of the nuclear attacks, at a time when visiting the museums is impossible amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and with this year marking the 75th anniversary of the bombings. Anybody who follows ICAN on Instagram can take part in the tours, which will broadcast a live stream of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who engage in peace education introducing the museums, including their exhibits, in English, according to ICAN. The videos of the tours will be preserved for 24 hours to make them available to people who live abroad and cannot watch them in real time. Akira Kawasaki, 51, a member of ICAN's international steering committee, said that viewing items on display at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki museums would be "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" for foreigners living abroad. "We want many people on the globe to receive valuable messages from Japan, the only nation attacked with nuclear weapons in the world, using Instagram," Kawasaki said. END