is a Japanese historian living in

Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui h ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. He is known fo
his research
into

Allied An alliance is a relationship among people, groups, or states that have joined together for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out among them. Members of an alliance are called ...

prisoners of war A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held Captivity, captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold priso ...

who died during the

air raids on Japan Air raids conducted by Allied forces on Japan during World War II caused extensive destruction to the country's cities and killed between 241,000 and 900,000 people. During the first years of the Pacific War these attacks were limited to the D ...

. His hug with U.S. President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...

during the president's visit to Hiroshima gained world-wide attention.

World War II

Mori was a young boy in Hiroshima during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. When the city was destroyed with an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, he was walking on a bridge and was thrown into a river. He saw a large number of badly wounded people who he was unable to help.

Postwar research

250px, Plaque to commemorate American soldiers killed by the atomic bomb. An atomic bomb survivor, Mori has spent over 30 years researching and obtaining official recognition for United States

aviator An aircraft pilot or aviator is a person who controls the flight of an aircraft by operating its Aircraft flight control system, directional flight controls. Some other aircrew, aircrew members, such as navigators or flight engineers, are al ...

s who were killed while being held as

POW A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of war ...

s in the Chugoku Military Police Headquarters, approximately 400m from the explosion's

hypocenter In seismology, a hypocenter or hypocentre () is the point of origin of an earthquake or a subsurface nuclear explosion. A synonym is the focus of an earthquake. Earthquakes An earthquake's hypocenter is the position where the strain energy s ...

in Hiroshima. He authored a book on the subject: ''A Secret History of U.S. Servicemembers Who Died in Atomic Bomb'' tha
has been translated to a web-based version
in English. A documentary film
Paper Lanterns
tells the story of Mori's work over several decades to learn and share the fate of the Americans who were killed by the blast, fire, and radiation by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. For decades, Mori has been trying to locate relatives of airmen from one of the aircraft shot down during an air raid on Kure, from the B-24J bomber "Taloa." Wreckage from the downed aircraft that had been hidden by local farmers was handed over to Mori with the hope of being returned to surviving family members for closure. Mori met and was embraced by US President

during Obama's May 2016 visit to Hiroshima.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mori, Shigeaki Living people 1937 births 20th-century Japanese historians