The Vow From Hiroshima

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(dramatic orchestral music) (Setsuko) Hiroshima.

Thats where I was born.

(news reporter) Setsuko Thurlow was only 13 years old when the bomb was dropped on her hometown.

(Mitchie) Setsuko has lived her entire life for nuclear disarmament.

(Tim) Setsuko is one of the most compelling people I have ever met.

Shes had a profound impact.

Its a crime against humanity.

(Steve) She is not just making a emotional appeal.

Setsuko is very intellectual, and she has a strategy.

This treaty can and will change the world.

(Andrew) She would, without hesitation, work herself to exhaustion to get her message across.

(man) People who make history in a positive way all have a sacred stubbornness.

(Setsuko) I dont regret how I have lived, but my work demanded certain sacrifice.

(Eric) You think about her journey from the ashes and the devastation of her hometown to Oslo and a Nobel Peace Prize.

Its an extraordinary life story.

(Setsuko) The dreams of the survivors of Hiroshima-Nagasaki has been witnessing the abolition of nuclear weapons.

I have a feeling I may be able to see it in my lifetime.

(crowd) No more Hiroshimas!

(male voice) No more Nagasakis!

(crowd) No more Nagasakis!

(Mitchie) My name is Mitchie Takeuchi.

My mother and my grandparents survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, but they kept their experiences secret.

I didnt learn about what really happened to them until I met Setsuko.

(crowd) Peace now!

(soft piano music) (Mitchie) Im gonna make a salad.

(Setsuko) Its all right.

(Mitchie) When we met, I felt instantly close to Setsuko.

(Setsuko speaking Japanese) We were both expats living outside of Japan for many years.

We even went to the same girls school in Hiroshima, though 20 years apart.

(Setsuko) This was high school.

My goodness.

Yeah, I see myself.

Here I am standing next to the teacher.

This was English class.

(Mitchie speaking Japanese) -You are so cute.

-Yeah.

(Mitchie) For all that we had in common, Setsuko had one quality that was missing from my life: a willingness to talk about the tragedy that happened in our beautiful city.

(Setsuko) This was my best friend.

She was in the center part of the city together with several thousand other students, and... most of them simply melted, vaporized, and all carbonized.

Those girls, they just crawled around and they couldnt see each other.

Their eyes were almost closed, but by the voice, they could identify each other.

This math teacher suggested, lets sing some hymns, and they sang "Nearer to Thee, My God."

Oh, that really breaks my heart when I think of that.

And as they sang, one by one, they just collapsed and died.

The teacher said, "Those of you who can stand up, lets walk over to the Red Cross hospital nearby."

My best friend stood up, and the teacher said, "Hang on to my shoulder.

I can support you."

So she put her hand over the shoulder of Miss Yonehara, and then the flesh and skin just came off and she could see white bone of the teachers shoulder.

(Mitchie) Listening to Setsuko awakened the dormant feelings I had about my familys history as Hiroshima survivors.

I met Setsuko by pure accident.

(Mitchie speaking Japanese) One day, I got a call from my friend, urgently looking for a Japanese interpreter.

Without knowing what the meeting was about, I agreed to go, and thats where I met Setsuko, and became a part of Hibakusha Stories.

(soft ambient music) (audience applauding) Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Kathleen and Im part of Hibakusha Stories.

Hibakusha is the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivor, and it is my deep privilege to bring to you today Setsuko Thurlow from Hiroshima.

(audience applauding) (Kathleen Sullivan) Hibakusha Stories mission is to bring the firsthand witness of those survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into classrooms so that young people can understand why nuclear weapons are still a risk to this day.

(Setsuko) My most important role is to share survivors experiences.

What actually happened.

Over 30,000 young people have heard us.

(conversing in Japanese) (Mitchie) Shortly after we met, Setsuko developed knee problems and needed a little extra help getting around, so I invited her to stay with me whenever she came to New York City to work with Hibakusha Stories.

(Setsuko) What I will speak would be what I personally experienced, and it could happen again in a larger scale, so we gotta do something about it.

I was 13 years of age at that time, I was in grade eight.

And we students were mobilized to decode top secret messages.

That morning, we had the assembly.

The man in charge, he was giving us a pep talk.

"Girls, this is the day you dedicate for the emperor.

Do your best."

We said, "Yes sir, we will do our best."

And at that moment in the window, I saw a bluish-white flash, just a blinding flash.

(ominous music) Then the next sensation I felt was just flying up in the air, and when I regained consciousness, I started hearing faint voices of my classmates around me.

"Mother, help me."

"I am here."

"God, help me."

All of a sudden, somebodys strong hand from behind shaking my left shoulder, and the mans voice said, "Dont give up, keep moving, keep pushing.

Im trying to free you.

And you see the sun ray coming through that opening.

Crawl toward it as quickly as possible."

So, I managed to come to the opening of the rubble.

I looked back and I could still hear my classmates voices, but it was already engulfed in flame.

Most of the 30 girls who were with me in the same room were burned to death alive.

By the time I came out, it was very dark, and as my eyes adjusted, I started seeing a procession of ghosts.

They simply did not look like human beings.

People covered with blood and burnt skin, blackened.

And the skin and the flesh were hanging from their bones.

And some people simply walking with their eyeballs in their hands.

(Kathleen Lawand) At the end of August, the Red Cross arrived at Hiroshima and our doctors witnessed something that was just beyond comprehension and beyond imagination.

The city had been wiped out.

The city center had been completely incinerated and destroyed.

Beyond that, there was severe damage from the firestorms.

And they noticed a mysteriously serious illness.

Persons who appeared to be recovering from their injuries all of a sudden were becoming sick again.

We know now this was the effect of radiation sickness and radiation exposure.

(eerie music) (Setsuko) We escaped to the foot of the hillside.

There was a huge military training ground, about two football fields combined.

By the time we got there, the place was packed with the dead bodies, dying people, and injured people.

They simply said in a whisper, "Give me water.

Water, please."

(Kathleen Lawand) 270 doctors that were in Hiroshima were killed, and many of the others were wounded.

How could you possibly cope with only a handful of doctors and nurses?

(Mitchie) My mother lived in the suburbs of Hiroshima.

When the atomic bomb was dropped, her father was the head of the Red Cross hospital and he never returned home.

Three days later, she decided to walk over three miles across the city of Hiroshima to look for him.

She found her father alive but seriously injured, his body pierced with shattered glass, and he had multiple fractured bones.

Confined to his bed, my grandfather continued to give directions to the medical staff seeking his advice.

My mother stayed at the hospital for a few weeks taking care of him.

My mother told me this story very casually when I was about 10 years old.

We were sitting side by side staring into a campfire after a long hike.

I could tell she was very proud of him.

It was only years later that I found out I was the only one who knew this story.

She hadnt even told my three brothers.

I told Setsuko that I didnt know much about my grandfathers experience.

I wish I had asked my mother more when she was alive, but... (Setsuko) Well, that happened to many of us.

We were too busy with our own growing up.

(Mitchie) Yeah, thats true.

She urged me to find out more about him.

(soft music) What I do know about my grandfather is that he was a military surgeon and a scientist.

He was also a poet and an artist.

He was kind and devoted to his family.

My grandfather was transferred from Tokyo to Hiroshima in 1938 to establish the new Red Cross hospital there.

Growing up after the war was long over, I wondered why we continued to live in Hiroshima when the rest of our extended family lived in Tokyo.

Why did my family stay?

I felt like an outsider, but somehow I knew I wasnt supposed to ask about this.

(solemn music) For the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing, Setsuko and I traveled to Japan to attend the memorial service for the alumnae at our girls school, Hiroshima Jogakuin.

(Setsuko) Boy, things have changed.

This was the first school building rebuilt in Hiroshima.

That was the beginning of a normal life for us.

When I think about Hiroshima, certain peoples images stand out clearly.

(birds singing) (soft music) (Setsuko speaking Japanese) I feel that weight of the memory.

After the bombing, when we lost everything, you begin to wonder, what is this all about?

What is life?

What is death?

I questioned many things.

I came from the Buddhist background, but at this school we had Christian teachers.

Finally, I decided I wanted to be part of that church.

My church minister, Reverend Tanimoto, he said, "Christian faith without action is not the Christian faith to me."

Choosing the profession of social work, choosing to do the work for anti-nuclear peace movement, all this comes from this school.

(Japanese PA announcement) (Mitchie) While I was in Hiroshima, I decided to research my familys history.

My first stop was the Red Cross hospital.

In 1947, the Showa Emperor came to Hiroshima for the first time after the bombing, and my grandfather had a meeting with the emperor to report on the condition of the survivors.

Before the war, the emperor was considered to be like a god.

After the war, everything changed.

There was a sense of shame about anyone involved with the military and the government.

So although my brothers and I knew that our grandfather had met with the emperor, it was something we never mentioned outside of the family.

Various staff members at the hospital told me a local artist was present to paint the meeting.

We discovered the painting buried in the storage room.

(gentle music) The painting was surprisingly bright with chartreuse green as the background.

We have a specific word for that color in Japanese, wakakusa iro, which is used to illustrate the color of young grass in the spring.

But interestingly, this meeting with the emperor took place in December.

Then I remembered, people feared that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 75 years, because of the radiation.

Maybe the color was meant to symbolize hope.

(Setsuko) After the bombing, occupation forces arrived.

One of the first things General MacArthur did was he started censorship of Japanese press... ...because they wrote about hibakusha, the survivors suffering.

Diaries, correspondences, anything personal like that, that creates negative impression of Americans, have to be confiscated.

(Mitchie) When I learned about the U.S. occupation censorship, I wondered if it played a part in my familys self-imposed code of silence.

(somber music) My grandfather had diligently kept daily journals with his own sketches for his entire life.

As I went through them, I could find nothing that related to his work a couple of years after the bombing.

That seemed strange to me.

I went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to see what I could find.

None of his missing journals were there, but I did discover a magazine article written by my grandfather in 1946, exactly a year after the A-bomb was dropped.

Despite the censorship, my grandfather had managed to describe in detail the devastation of the bomb and the strong connection he felt with other survivors.

My grandfather ended the article with a poignant haiku.

(Mitchie speaking Japanese) Summer grass is growing, standing in the ruins, impossible to leave.

I finally realized why my grandfather had stayed in Hiroshima.

He felt a deep connection to the people and to the city.

(Setsuko) My third year at the university, I decided to travel to an international Christian work camp in small coal mining town.

At that camp, I did meet Jim.

(acoustic guitar music) He told me that when he saw me coming in, he said, "Hey, life is looking up."

He said that to me later.

I found him attractive as a human being.

Very gentle, quiet, caring, yet a very steely conviction.

We got to know each other very well, and we had fun together.

By the end of the summer, he wrote to his parents in Canada about me.

They sent a very happy response.

Well, if their son chose the woman, she must be a fine person.

But things didnt work that way with my family.

My parents were traditional.

They just couldnt think of allowing their daughter to be married to non-Japanese man.

(soft music) And I came back to Hiroshima until I graduated from university.

(explosion) In March 1954, United States started testing the most powerful hydrogen bomb up to that date.

And a Japanese fishing boat happened to be around.

All the tuna fish had to be thrown away, and one crew member died.

That was big news in Japan, and overnight it was the birth in Japan of unprecedented protest movement.

Imagine, 20 million signatures were collected to abolish nuclear weapons.

Thats huge in number.

(gentle music) A year later, Jim was still in Japan, so after careful consideration, my parents gave us consent.

After the wedding, Jim and I moved to Canada, and our student life started again.

We were poor students in a basement apartment.

It was painfully difficult.

Such poverty was not part of my notion of marriage, but I hid my tears.

I didnt want to hurt Jim.

And then one day I learned that I was pregnant.

That was a frightening time for me.

Would I have... deformed babies?

That was a real concern I had.

Some women who were pregnant at that time did.

I called Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Hospital and consulted with a doctor.

She said, we just have to take a chance.

(soft piano music) I was fortunate.

I had two sons, healthy babies.

I just count the blessing each day.

(giggling) We settled in Toronto, and my main job was to raise the children.

Very domesticated life.

I have to organize this.

(soft music) -This is gorgeous.

-Oh, thats in Paris.

This is my father.

He went to Northern California, made money, and went back.

My family was old samurai family, and they had the highest status.

Im the youngest of the seven children, privileged life, I should say.

So when I started taking social work lessons, I really didnt realize until then I was so class prejudiced.

I was looking down on the people who didnt have as much.

That was a real struggle for me, to learn to accept human beings regardless of background.

This is Ayako.

She was my favorite sister.

She was a funny woman.

She was in the States.

After she came back to Hiroshima, she dressed like an American woman, and I just watched everything my sister did.

(somber music) She died in the atomic bombing.

My sister and her four-year-old child were in the center part of the city, so they were burned beyond recognition.

Their bodies were twice larger than normal.

We could identify them by their voice, by the special hairpin she had in her hair.

And they just kept on asking for water.

And we had no medication, no food or anything.

Um, after several days of agonizing suffering, they finally died.

When they died, the soldiers came, dug up the hole in the ground, threw the dead bodies in there, poured the gasoline, threw the lighted match.

(fire crackling) There I was, 13-year-old girl, just standing and my parents were standing there.

We just, in a stunned way, just kept watching while they were cremated.

There was no human dignity or anything.

They were just being treated like insect or animal.

That memory was one of the most painful for me.

(dark music) (soft music) (Mitchie) When I was growing up, all of us had a very normal life, as if nothing ever happened in Hiroshima.

When I was a teenager, I really wanted to leave to go to the United States to study psychology, and my mother, even though she felt really sad about letting me go... ...she supported me.

Then, right before I left, we discovered that my mother had a serious heart condition.

My father changed his mind.

For my mothers sake, he did not want me to leave... ...but she insisted that I go.

She felt that she had spent her life fulfilling the expectations of her family.

She wanted me to follow my own desires and make my own life for myself.

She wanted to live her life through me, in some ways.

I really wanted to try my young adult life in New York City, which represented to me the freedom to pursue anything that I set my mind to.

(soft piano music) (Setsuko) 1975 was the 30th anniversary of Hiroshima-Nagasaki.

There were commemorative events in Japan, but in United States and Canada, those special days was ignored.

I thought, "We have to break the silence.

We have to make this issue visible."

(soft music) So we had this photographic exhibition at the University of Toronto... ...and that was the birth of the organization.

The organization was called Hiroshima-Nagasaki Relived.

The intent was to provide general education on the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

(Setsuko) I didnt realize how hard its going to be to go public.

It was really painful to talk about my survivor experience.

I felt very strongly, I did not wish just to talk about suffering.

Im not interested in sympathy.

I want your commitment.

I want your action.

What I really wanted them to write about was this nuclear arms race and what change needs to take place in policy-making.

Ive called for whatever it takes to be strong enough that no other nation on Earth will dare violate the peace.

(applause) (Joe) Ronald Reagan got to power in 1980.

Reagans policy was the United States could actually fight and win a nuclear war, and so the arms race was given a fresh start at that time.

Were already in an arms race.

A global peace movement just erupted.

There were tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, and in some places, millions of people rallying.

(intense music) (Setsuko) I remember 1982 at Central Park.

We couldnt even get in, it was so packed.

That was an amazing experience.

(Joe) We had busloads of Canadians going down there.

Rome had a million.

London had a million.

Berlin had half a million.

It was just unbelievable global effort.

(Eric) In 1982, in Central Park, at that time was the largest political demonstration in American history.

And the worldwide revulsion towards nuclear weapons is what empowered Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to seriously discuss at Reykjavik abolishing nuclear weapons.

(Setsuko) It was a great event for our goal, that is the abolition of nuclear weapons.

(Andrew) Being a survivor certainly gave my mother a lot of instant credibility.

That made her somebody who was in demand.

(Joe) Setsuko and Jim were very active here in the city of Toronto, and they were so clear about their commitment to peace and justice issues confronting our world.

Every speech I gave, Jim checked.

Sometimes writing speeches late at night, I just start uncontrollable sobbing.

The only person who has seen me do that is Jim.

(gentle music) I just couldnt have coped by myself.

He was always there for me.

(cheering) (Josefin) In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and everyone thought that nuclear weapons would just disappear and solve itself, so engagement in nuclear disarmament lost its force.

(Eric) Enormous progress was made between the United States and Russia, reducing the sizes of their arsenals by 80, 85% since their peak.

The nuclear issue was essentially forgotten.

I did continue my activism, but in those days I spent most of my energy as a social worker, and also Jims physical condition began to deteriorate.

(gentle piano music) -Thats pretty, isnt it?

-Yeah.

(Andrew) Mid-90s, he had his bypass surgery.

Gradually, at that point, he was becoming weaker.

He was still able to help with her speeches, but he wasnt able to travel with her.

But he certainly encouraged her not to slow down.

He said to her that shes gonna have to work for both of them.

(Setsuko) I was invited to participate in the Peace Boat, to go around the world and help spread the message of peace with 100 survivors from Hiroshima-Nagasaki.

I hesitated to accept it.

(Kathleen Sullivan) When Setsuko was on the global voyage, Jim was not well, and he went into a nursing facility for those three months.

(Setsuko) I flew home just in time for his birthday.

I must admit, I had some sense of regret that I took a lot of time away from my husband.

When he retired, we wanted to write together, and he waited for me too long, and I feel guilty that I made him wait.

We could have started a new chapter, but that chapter never came, and I feel guilty about that.

(soft music) Jim and I shared 56 years.

What you call it?

Soulmate?

So you can imagine the void I felt when he passed.

(Mitchie) As long as I lived in the United States, I carried a sense of guilt about leaving my mother.

In 2007, when I learned that she had pancreatic cancer and only a few months to live, I decided to go home to be with her till the end.

(Kathleen Lawand) We know today that those who were exposed to radiation after the atomic bombs were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in fact, their children as well, suffer from cancer rates that are far higher than the general population, and so this is the continued impact of those bombs 70-plus years on.

(Mitchie) My mother was so relieved that I had no deadline to return to New York City.

One day, I apologized to her for moving so far away.

She said, "Oh, Michan, dont cry.

That happened many years ago.

I was happy that you got to pursue the life you wanted."

Those last days together were very special for us.

I had so many questions that I wanted to ask her, but she was getting weaker and weaker.

I had missed my chance.

My questions would never be answered.

I have witnessed hell on Earth, but the horrible catastrophic destruction was caused by a very primitive bomb.

Over the past 70 years, the world kept on piling up nuclear weapons.

16,000 of them, and a lot more powerful.

(rockets roaring) Nuclear weapons are viewed as a status symbol.

They should be seen as badges of shame, as the markers of rogue nations who are putting the entire world at risk.

So, about 10 years ago, we formed an umbrella group called the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

We have 468 organizations associated with ICAN right now.

Its in about 100 countries.

Its really a bottom-up campaign.

(Setsuko) I was so delighted that young people provided the major leadership in that organization.

(Ira) This campaign and governments around the world began a series of international conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear war.

(Tim) The conferences really put the focus on what these weapons do to people, and this was strangely absent from so many discussions on nuclear disarmament previously.

(Mitchie) Setsuko was thrust onto the world stage at the Vienna Conference.

I had heard her testimony many times, but it was here that I saw her tremendous impact on the global debate about nuclear weapons.

(soft instrumental music) (Setsuko) So, have a good look.

Here are 351 schoolmates of mine.

Each one had a life, had a name, and was loved.

Until recently, we have been talking about military deterrence and balance of power, and I am relieved, finally, we are talking about human beings, what the nuclear weapons do to human beings.

All these friends of mine are gone.

Theyre wiped out from the face of the planet.

(Tim) One of the things that I admire about Setsuko is her fearlessness, the fact that shes willing to really speak truth to power.

(Kathleen Sullivan) In Vienna, the Japanese ambassador said something along the lines of, "Lets not be so pessimistic about how we might respond to a nuclear attack," and Setsuko was like, "I cant believe he said that."

She went over and said, as a survivor of Hiroshima, that opinion was very offensive to her.

Really putting it to him in no uncertain terms, and boy, was her picture on the front page in Japan that next morning.

(Akira) Because Setsuko was so strong and powerful, many governments thought that they have to do something new, and that led to the Humanitarian Pledge.

(Steve) This pledge says we should have some kind of legal instrument to make it very clear to everyone that we consider nuclear weapons illegal.

This was a hugely significant moment.

Country after country adopted this Humanitarian Pledge and expressed their readiness to start negotiations on a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

The only way to guarantee the security that you all seek is through the total elimination of nuclear weapons and their prohibition.

(Setsuko) The Humanitarian Pledge has received the signature from 121 nations.

That is tremendous momentum.

I feel so empowered, so...gratified.

(Mitchie) After the success of the Humanitarian Pledge, negotiations began at the United Nations on a treaty to categorically prohibit nuclear weapons.

(Ray) When we started pursuing a nuclear weapon ban treaty, we were really looking to the lessons that we had learned from prohibiting landmines and cluster bombs.

We learned that you dont need all of the so-called big powers to transform international law, and to stigmatize these weapons by outlawing them.

So we knew going in we didnt have any of the nuclear-armed states supporting this, but it wasnt necessary.

These countries couldnt control the discourse anymore.

We were surprised with the extremely aggressive pressure from the nuclear-armed states.

On the opening of the negotiations, quite dramatically, the U.S. ambassador, Nikki Haley, and some of her allies staged a protest press conference.

You are gonna see almost 40 countries that are not in the General Assembly today, and thats 40 countries that are saying, we would love to have a ban on nuclear treaty-- on nuclear weapons, but we have to be realistic.

(Beatrice) It was really quite a big sign that we were onto something very important, if the U.S. government would have to protest outside the negotiating room.

Setsuko and the hibakusha, they have been so instrumental in the treaty negotiations.

(Setsuko) Madam President and delegates, whenever I remember Hiroshima, the first image that comes to my mind is my four-year-old nephew who was transformed into an unrecognizable, blackened, swollen, melted chunk of flesh... who kept begging for water in a faint voice until his death released him from agony.

This little boys image has come to represent in my mind all the innocent children of the world, threatened as they are at this very moment by nuclear weapons.

I want you to feel the spirit of the dead witnesses from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Please do your job well and know that we hibakusha, survivors, have no doubt that this treaty can and will change the world.

(tense music) (female delegate) My delegation requests a formal recorded vote.

(indistinct chatter) (man) Oh my God, theyre all green.

(cheers and applause) (Mitchie) In July 2017, the United Nations voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

(Setsuko) I never thought I would see this moment.

Ive been waiting for this day for seven decades, and I am overjoyed that it has finally arrived.

Nuclear weapon has always been immoral.

Now theyre also illegal.

(cheers and applause) (Mitchie) However, adoption was only the first step.

The treaty still needed to be ratified by 50 nations to become international law.

My plea to all of you is, you media people, do your part.

Is New York Times here?

Washington Post here?

I dont think so.

We have to pressure them.

(Mitchie) At that time, there was an event at the United Nations where several hibakusha gave testimony.

Until I heard this woman from Nagasaki speak, I used to think that my mother was kind of chicken not to be able to talk about what has happened to her, because she was probably too emotionally fragile, while Setsuko was courageous to speak about what has happened to her and give the testimony many, many times.

Then Mrs. Kimura said something that caught me completely off guard.

So now we have some moments for questions and comments from the floor.

As a second-generation hibakusha myself, listening to you talking about how you wanted to protect your children by not talking about it.

Now, I really appreciate what my mother must have felt.

(Setsuko) I have lots more, please eat.

(Mitchie) Finally, when I heard Mrs. Kimuras speech, something clicked in my mind, and I said, "Ah... my mother didnt maybe talk about it so that we wont be discriminated."

-She could have said... -Do you think she wanted to protect the children?

(Mitchie) I think so.

So, when I heard Mrs. Kimura talking about her experience of discrimination, that really made me want to cry, because I could really understand.

(soft piano music) All those years I grew up surrounded by unspoken anxiety, thinking that my mother was weak.

I finally got it.

I had always thought that my grandfather was the heroic figure in our familys story.

But now, I grasped what strength it took for my mother to maintain a lifetime of silence.

(solemn music) In 2017, ICAN and the nuclear ban movement was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

As one of their major campaigners, Setsuko was excited to see if their work would be recognized.

(Nobel representative) Good morning, everybody.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN.

(bright music) I quiver with delight!

Lets scream.

(laughter) Ahh!

(Ray) So, today were honored to announce that Setsuko Thurlow will be jointly accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on ICANs behalf in Oslo in December.

(bright piano music) (Mitchie) We arrived in Oslo just before Christmas.

I really enjoyed seeing Setsuko treated like a rock star.

(majestic trumpet music) (applause) (Setsuko) Every second of every day, nuclear weapons endanger everything we hold dear.

When I was a 13-year-old girl trapped in the smoldering rubble, I kept pushing.

I kept moving toward the light.

And I survived.

Our light now is a ban treaty.

I repeat those words that I heard in the ruins of Hiroshima.

"Dont give up.

Keep pushing, keep moving.

See the light.

Crawl towards it."

Tonight, we march through the streets of Oslo with torches aflame.

Let us follow each other out of the dark night of nuclear terror.

This is our commitment for our one precious world to survive.

(applause, cheers) I was so gratified.

I kept having tears.

Tears of joy.

This is going to change the world.

(applause) (Andrew) My mom wants to keep going as long as she can.

Being an activist is extremely important to her, and I think she realizes that she has a limited number of years left.

(Setsuko) When 50 nations ratify the treaty, that would be the day I wish I could be alive to witness.

(soft piano music) (bright orchestral music) I am certainly so grateful to all those people who worked with us around the world.

Seventy-five years.

All of us have a job to do.

We have to work with our own government, especially our governments are reluctant to sign, ratify.

We have to work harder.

The inscription in the Peace Park in Hiroshima says, "Rest in Peace.

This error will not be repeated."

This became the vow and prayer of survivors.

Certainly, it is mine.

I do believe that we can fulfill our vow.

(dramatic music) (male announcer) Major funding for this program was provided by Naropa University.

Naropa embodies a deep commitment to environmental and nuclear guardianship in pursuit of a more sustainable and peaceful world.

Learn more at naropa.edu.

And by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which has been educating and advocating for a world free of nuclear weapons since 1982.

Also by RSF Social Finance, working with donors and investors to support nonprofits and social enterprises creating positive change.

A community for people who are ready for a regenerative approach to finance.