TOKYO, March 17 (Reuters) – Shigeaki Mori, the survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing whom former U.S. President Barack Obama embraced during a historic visit to the city in 2016, has died at 88, Jiji Press reported on Tuesday.
The image of Obama’s arms wrapped around a tearful Mori at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park became a defining moment of that visit – the first ever by a sitting U.S. president.
Mori was eight years old when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, flattening the city on August 6, 1945 and knocking him unconscious with the force of its blast.
Thirty years later, Mori embarked on a multi-decade quest to find victims who were cremated at his school playground. His work also identified 12 Americans who died in the bombing.
He died in a hospital in Hiroshima on March 14, Jiji reported.
Many nuclear bomb survivors – known as “hibakusha” in Japanese – despite their advanced age and dwindling numbers have tried to keep alive the legacies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two cities to ever suffer a nuclear attack. The cities have counted some 550,000 deaths from the attacks to date, including from illnesses related to acute radiation exposure.
(Reporting by Hina Suzuki, Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Thomas Derpinghaus)
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