Preamble

We, the 59 participants of the 6th Hiroshima Junior International Forum, held from August 17th to 20th 2021, collaborated together online from 14 countries around the world. Our aim was to learn about and discuss the abolition of nuclear weapons as well as peacebuilding.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) came into force in January of this year. This will be an integral and essential step towards the abolition of nuclear weapons. However, the division between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states has yet to be overcome. In addition people around the world continue to be displaced by prolonged civil wars, terrorist attacks as well as natural disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose further challenges for the population of the world.

Under such circumstances, we are acutely aware of the importance of the need for the younger generation to act upon what we have learned here. Furthermore, we are convinced of the need to deepen our understanding of the challenges facing us and the current efforts being undertaken to meet those challenges. Having strong support from the Hiroshima community, we, the youth of today, participated in this forum as an important step for achieving such goals. Spending four days together, we learned from experts in this field, shared our knowledge and gained inspiration from each other.

This forum showed us how people from thousands of kilometers away from each other can become one mind and work together to make a change for the world. It was such a great opportunity to see from different perspectives and exchange information with such amazing young people.

In this Hiroshima Declaration, we have compiled the results and fruits of our learning and discussion. The Hiroshima Declaration is a proposal to local and national government leaders, business leaders around the world and the rest of society, as well as an action plan for us, the participants.

 

 

<Challenges and Solutions for Abolition of Nuclear Weapons>

Toward nuclear weapons abolition, we recognize that pervasive distrust and insecurities in terms of military power among nations is a massive barrier.

For this challenge, we suggest improved mutual understanding and international relationships between countries and different cultures through more interactive activities to realize the rationale of nuclear weapons abolition which can lead to establishing peace.

As a solution to this issue, we recommend a platform to gather opinions or ideas of general mass on nuclear weapons abolition throughout the world as it will help build reciprocal respect for every nation and culture.

 

<Our Role for Abolition of Nuclear Weapons>

We, the young people commit to communicate and have online events with Hibakusha. As they get older, we think providing them the platform they need to share their stories through social media should be our responsibility.

We, as the future generation, can also get in touch with content creators and social media influencers in order to reach more people and spread more awareness about such issues.

We, the leaders of the future, commit to take part in movements and join campaigns that support the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons.

 

<The Role of Hiroshima for Abolition of Nuclear Weapons>

We request Hiroshima to promote empathy within the other prefectures so that they can unitedly influence Japan to sign the treaty.

We believe that Hiroshima should support Hibakusha financially for them to have opportunities to tell how nuclear weapons are a huge threat to humanity.

As Hiroshima is the first place to experience atom bombing, it can inspire other devastated countries to realize the gruesomeness of nuclear weapons through sharing their horrific experiences of the first nuclear explosion and how they restored peace afterwards.

 

<Challenges and Solutions for Peacebuilding>

Towards peacebuilding, we recognize that some of the major issues that are holding us back from creating a peaceful community are racism, xenophobia and prejudice against other nations/ethnicities.

For this challenge, we suggest improving the education system as a way to decrease these issues by informing more people more efficiently.

In addition, we recommend events, festivals, symposiums and such organizations that gather around different cultures and introduce them, because we believe that one of the biggest issues behind racism is lack of information so in that way people can know more about different cultures in an informative way and learn how to respect them even more.

 

<Our Role for Peacebuilding>

We, the young people commit to educate ourselves as much as we can through the sources we can find such as books, encyclopedias and reliable internet sources.

We, the future generation commit to reach as many people as we can through campaigns, through social media and other elements of the internet. Before these methods, we believe that the first thing to start off with is to talk to people around us and inform them first. This can be through a small discussion group with friends, with people from school and people from the city we’re living in. Since we want to reach more people, we can use our sources of internet to reach other people and influence them as much as we can. We can also share them through cultural activities like play, dance etc.

We, the future leaders commit to participate in forums like the Hiroshima Junior International Forum with great enthusiasm as we can exchange our valuable opinions with young people from different countries of different opinions.

 

<The Role of Hiroshima for Peacebuilding>

We believe that Hiroshima can support other countries to restore themselves because there was a miraculous recovery from 76 years ago. They can help not only inside Japan but also outside as well.

We think that Hiroshima should provide their peace education to students who live in other prefectures in Japan so that they can have opportunities to learn about peacebuilding.
We expect Hiroshima to arrange these sort of forums more. And in order to make them more interesting we suggest them to include games, sports and documentary films etc.

 

Closing

We participants are now highly aware that specialized knowledge is fundamental for us to understand the challenges that we face and to be able to propose effective solutions. We have also reaffirmed that it is important to mutually respect each other while discussing issues and deriving solutions. While we recognized the importance of outreach, we also grew to realize the strategic relevance that we should spread our message by using the appropriate tools and methods.

We know that our responsibilities do not end with the announcement of the Hiroshima Declaration. We know we need to put the action plan presented here into practice. When we interact with people to share our suggestions, we know we need to collaborate with like-minded people, but we also need to have dialogues with people who hold different perspectives and opinions to seek better solutions for the whole of society. Through such efforts, we believe that we can achieve nuclear abolition, peacebuilding, and the resolution for other fundamentally vital issues.

Now all of us on earth face many challenges and difficulties. It is time for us to take decisive and concrete action. As the young generation and future leaders of the world we now hope to fulfill our responsibilities to contribute in the creation of a peaceful world we hereby make this declaration and stake our determination to achieve it.

 

August 20, 2021