Hibakusha Stories

Hibakusha Stories is an initiative of Youth Arts New York in partnership with Peace Boat, the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation and New York Theatre Workshop. The Project provides the opportunity for New York City high school students to hear eyewitness accounts of one of the most significant events in human history— the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. The survivors are called hibakusha.

Students who participate in Hibakusha Stories will become direct lineage carriers of one of the most important stories of the twentieth century. The hibakusha, as their elders, have given them the gift of guardianship of this story. We have entrusted them with a remembrance responsibility to pass on the story of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to their children and their grandchildren.

Oral tradition has been the way that the wisdom of the elders has been passed to the next generation since the dawn of time. Long after digital information storage has been lost, oral tradition will remain.

The work of our participating teachers and the Hibakusha Stories website is to provide students with the tools they will need to co-create a peaceful and sustainable future.

Most recently Hibakusha Stories is ecstatic, as a proud member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), to be the recipient of  the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Hibakusha Stories is one of the 468 organizations in over 100 countries and territories that shares this grass-roots prize.

The Hibakusha Stories website has seen a worldwide audience over the last 10+ years, and has been lauded for its in-depth articles and exhaustive educational resources for many audiences.

After a year-long upgrade the new and improved Hibakusha Stories website debuted in early June, 2017, under the supervision of Webworks to upgrade to a new WordPress Avada theme codebase for easy updating, and security.  Since its inception in 2009 the school programs have expanded and grown tremendously, and so has the site. In the last website upgrade the content nearly doubled, and now includes many hundreds of new images from the programs in sophisticated image galleries. As complex as the content has become, much emphasis has been placed on easy navigation, the ability to search its extensive content. In 2019, the website migrated to speedier servers for better reliability and performance.