HIROSHIMA - Shigeaki Mori, a historian and an atomic bomb survivor who met Barack Obama in 2016 during the then U.S. president's visit to Hiroshima, died at the weekend at a hospital in the Japanese city, his family said Tuesday. He was 88.
Mori was known for his decades-long efforts in investigating and identifying 12 American prisoners-of-war who were killed in the U.S. atomic bombing that devastated Hiroshima in the closing stages of World War II. He himself had survived the blast at age 8.
He garnered global attention through an emotional embrace with Obama, who became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his stated intention to seek a world without nuclear weapons.
Mori authored the book "The Secret History of the American POWs Killed by the Atomic Bomb," published in 2008, based on U.S. and Japanese official documents about the dozen U.S. soldiers who died in the atomic bombing.
His study into the American POWs, which he carried out while working for a company, won him the Kikuchi Kan Prize, a prestigious cultural award in Japan, in 2016.
The U.S. bombings of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later are estimated to have killed around 210,000 people by the end of that year. Japan surrendered six days after the Nagasaki bombing, bringing an end to World War II.
