08/25/2026
Stephen Hiroshi Miwa, President of the Larry Miwa Peace Foundation, spoke about "Gambare Hiroshima, Don't Give Up!" the diary his father kept as a boy in Hiroshima in 1945. Larry was born in Hawaiʻi and was in Japan for school when the bomb fell. He rediscovered the diary sixty-three years later.
Larry Fumio Miwa was born in Hawaiʻi on July 5, 1931. He was a thirteen and fourteen-year-old middle school student in Japan when he kept a diary through the two months surrounding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Sixty-three years after his last Hiroshima entry, he found the diary again.
Over the last few years of his father’s life, Stephen produced Gambare Hiroshima, Don’t Give Up! as a first-time co-author, honoring one of Larry’s final wishes: to share the diary for peace. Larry worked as a corporate banker in Honolulu for more than five decades.
Father and son established the Larry Miwa Peace Foundation, which donates one hundred percent of monetary gifts received and directs book sale proceeds to peace organizations worldwide, with priority to those working to abolish nuclear weapons or to build awareness of the tragedies of war. Inaugural gifts in summer 2024 went to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Geneva; the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Foundation and its subsidiaries, including the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the National Hall for Atomic Bomb Victims, and Mayors for Peace; the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam; and the American Society of Hiroshima-Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors in Los Angeles.
The foundation’s focus for 2025 and 2026 is to place the diary with peace organizations across Hawaiʻi, the mainland, Japan, and beyond. Ohana Arts sold nearly 250 copies through its Peace on Your Wings production. Pacific Historic Parks sold autographed copies at Pearl Harbor during the eighty-fourth anniversary week. And the Hiroshima City Internationalization Department presented the book to every invited dignitary at the eightieth anniversary ceremony of the bombing in August 2025.
