03/18/2026
In Shigeaki Mori, a Japanese atomic bomb survivor from Hiroshima, President Obama saw the best of humanity, even while reflecting on one of our darkest chapters.
Mori died Sunday at age 88. Today, we honor his example, which President Obama spoke to in 2016 when he visited Hiroshima on the 71st anniversary of America dropping the atomic bomb on that city. Among the more than 140,000 killed in Hiroshima, Mori discovered 30 years later that there were 12 American POWs. He researched the men and wrote to their families, who didn’t yet know how their loved ones had died.
President Obama was the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, and while there, he reflected on Mori’s work — how it connected people through their shared humanity, regardless of their countless differences: “We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story — one that describes a common humanity; one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.
We see these stories in the hibakusha — the woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself; the man who sought out families of Americans killed here, because he believed their loss was equal to his own.”
In telling the story of the universality of loss, Mori set an example for us all and we are all better for his contributions.
