TADATOSHI AKIBA
Mayor of Hiroshima

[Biography | Honorary Degree]

Throughout his life, TADATOSHI AKIBA has been driven by a childhood memory of “beautiful incendiary bombs coming down on us at night and the terror they created.” When the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago this August, Akiba was three years old and living outside Tokyo, where other bombings took place. He once said, “The longest minute I ever experienced was the time I was waiting for my mother to come back from our bomb shelter where she carried my baby brother first when the air raid warning sounded. Later, when I learned what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was very natural that those experiences merged with mine to form my basic feelings about war and human suffering.”

Akiba is a former mathematics faculty member at Tufts University whose ongoing passion and commitment to social change and peace have resulted in a political career that has brought him onto the world stage. He came to Tufts in 1972 as an assistant professor of mathematics and was promoted to associate professor in 1976. He left Tufts in 1986 to become a visiting professor of humanities at Hiroshima Shudo University, where he served as professor of humanities from 1988 to 1997.

Akiba was elected to Japan’s House of Representatives in 1990. In 1999, he was elected mayor of Hiroshima, a post he holds today.
During much of his personal and public life, Akiba has been an ardent spokesman for A-bomb survivors and their effort to make sure that the pain and suffering that resulted from the bombing of Hiroshima are not forgotten.

While at Tufts, he helped found the Hibakusha Travel Grant Program, which brings American community newspaper reporters to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to learn about the use of the atomic bomb on those cities and the long-term results that came from unleashing the most horrific weapons mankind has created. He also taught an Experimental College course at Tufts on the experiences of the hibakusha for which he received an innovative teaching award. Based on this experience, he has worked to establish peace study courses at colleges and universities around the world. As president of Mayors for Peace, a nuclear disarmament NGO established in 1982, he has successfully rejuvenated its activities by more than doubling its membership to include approximately 1,000 cities in 110 countries and regions.

“What the Hiroshima survivors are telling us is that no one else should ever go through the experience they suffered,” he told a reporter three years ago. “An atomic bombing creates a living hell on Earth where the living envy the dead.”

Akiba never intended to become involved in politics. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1966 with a B.S. in mathematics and earned a master’s degree in mathematics from the same university two years later. He continued his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Ph.D. in 1970. His field was topology, the study of the properties of geometric figures or solids.

While a faculty member at Tufts, Akiba’s activism was sparked by listening to a Boston radio call-in show discussing whether America’s use of the atomic bombs was right or wrong. To his dismay, 90 percent of the callers said the bombings were justified. Akiba believed it was important to explain the implications of such violence and the long-term effects an atomic bomb has on both the physical and mental health of the survivors.

As mayor of Hiroshima, he has been recognized for safeguarding the environment, fostering economic development and encouraging the use of information technology. In 2004, he was a finalist in an annual contest for World Mayor, run by an international organization that seeks to honor mayors who have served their communities and made contributions to the well-being of cities around the world.

Underlying all of Akiba’s work is his determination to keep the world aware of what happened in his city. “The world at large,” he told a reporter, “has no strong awareness of what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience actually means, that is, its meaning with respect to the lives of those who experienced it. I feel it is my duty as mayor of Hiroshima to represent those voices.”

Each year Akiba offers a peace declaration on August 6, the anniversary of the bombing. Three years ago he referred to the “annual reliving of that terrible tragedy” by survivors of the atomic blast.

“In some ways more painful,” he wrote, “is the fact that their experience appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind. Having never experienced an atomic bombing, the vast majority around the world can only vaguely imagine such horror, and these days, John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth are all but forgotten. As predicted by the saying, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing.”

Since 2003, Akiba has been inspiring and directing a global campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. He will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.