{"id":8957,"date":"2026-03-19T02:10:57","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T02:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/2026\/03\/19\/hiroshima-atomic-bomb-survivor-and-historian-shigeki-mori-dies-at-88\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T02:10:58","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T02:10:58","slug":"hiroshima-atomic-bomb-survivor-and-historian-shigeki-mori-dies-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/2026\/03\/19\/hiroshima-atomic-bomb-survivor-and-historian-shigeki-mori-dies-at-88\/","title":{"rendered":"Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor and historian Shigeki Mori dies at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Tokyo — <\/span>Shigeki Mori, a Japanese atomic bomb survivor<\/a> in Hiroshima and a historian, but he is best known for a big hug given by then-U.S. President Barack Obama<\/a> He died during his historic visit to the city a decade ago. He was 88 years old.<\/p>\n

Born in 1937, Mori was 8 years old when he survived the American attack on August 6, 1945, just 2\u00bd kilometers (1\u00bd miles) from the explosion. Nearly 30 years later, he discovered a little-known fact \u2013 that American prisoners of war held in Japan were among those killed by atomic bombs dropped by their own country.<\/p>\n

Working as a full-time company employee, Mori researched American and Japanese official documents and located 12 American POWs. He wrote letters to their bereaved families in America, who did not know how their loved ones died.<\/p>\n

The American nuclear attack on Hiroshima instantly destroyed the city and killed thousands of people. The death toll by the end of that year was 140,000. A Second bomb dropped on Nagasaki<\/a> Another 70,000 were killed. <\/p>\n

Mori wrote the book “The Secret of the American PoWs Killed by the Atomic Bomb”, published in Japanese in 2008. The book won him the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Award, and was later translated into English.<\/p>\n

The editors of the English translation of his book said on their website that Mori died on Sunday in a Hiroshima hospital. <\/p>\n

His research ultimately led the United States to confirm the deaths of 12 American service members caught in the bombing.<\/p>\n

Mori later said, “The research I spent more than 40 years doing was not about people of an enemy country. It was about human beings.”<\/p>\n

Obama, who in 2016 became the first US leader to visit Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, mentioned “a dozen captive Americans” as one of the victims in his speech. He recognized Mori for seeking out the families of Americans, believing that their loss was equal to his own, and later embraced him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tokyo — Shigeki Mori, a Japanese atomic bomb survivor in Hiroshima and a historian, but he is best known for a big hug given by then-U.S. President Barack Obama He died during his historic visit to the city a decade ago. He was 88 years old. Born in 1937, Mori was 8 years old when<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[3765,1821,1499,3764,3767,3769,3768,3766],"class_list":{"0":"post-8957","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bible-news","8":"tag-atomic","9":"tag-bomb","10":"tag-dies","11":"tag-hiroshima","12":"tag-historian","13":"tag-mori","14":"tag-shigeki","15":"tag-survivor"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8957"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8958,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8957\/revisions\/8958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}