Prime Minister meets Nobel Peace Prize laureates
News story | Date: 11/12/2024 | Office of the Prime Minister
This morning, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre welcomed representatives of Nihon Hidankyo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, to the annual breakfast event held in connection with the Peace Prize award ceremony. The Prime Minister was also presented with 1 000 paper cranes commemorating the children who lost their lives in the atomic bomb attacks in Japan at the end of the Second World War.
This year, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo. Nihon Hidankyo is a grassroots movement of survivors of the 1945 atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Never again
Terumi Tanaka, Shigemitsu Tanaka and Toshiyuki Mimaki represented the organisation at the Nobel Peace Prize breakfast.
‘It was very moving to meet survivors of the atomic bomb attacks who have spent their lives working to ensure that no one else has to experience what they went through. Their efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons are crucial, particularly at a time when threats to use nuclear weapons are once again being heard,’ Mr Støre said.
1 000 paper cranes
Before his meeting with the Nobel Peace Prize laureates, the Prime Minister was presented with 1 000 paper cranes folded by pupils at the Japanese school in Oslo. The paper crane is the logo of Nihon Hidankyo.
‘As part of a school project, we have folded 1 000 cranes out of paper and joined them together with threads to make a “senbazuru”. We hope that it will bring lasting peace in Norway, Japan and across the world,’ said Malene Satoko Katayama Taxt (14).
The pupils told the story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl living in Hiroshima who was only two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped. Sadako was later diagnosed with terminal cancer. According to an ancient Japanese legend, anyone who folds a thousand cranes out of paper will be granted a wish. Sadako wanted to live and set about folding paper cranes. To this day, a statue of Sadako stands in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, commemorating all the children who died as a result of the atomic bombings.