Our vice-chair Hannah Kemp-Welch has spent the month of August in Hiroshima and has been sending regular reports back from her time there. You can check out her video report on the World Conference Against A&H Bombs here. Below, she speaks of the lantern floating ceremony in Hiroshima to mark the anniversary of the dropping of the bomb.

We arrived at the Motoyasu River in Hiroshima shortly after dusk. The banks closest to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial were already teeming with people - music floated over to us. Our group walked to a quieter spot, where a stall had been set up with volunteers distributing lanterns. The lanterns were flat packed and paper, in three colours. We wrote our wishes for peace on them with thick markers, then gently pulled the paper over a wooden cross, the stand that held it together. We inserted our candles in the center and struggled against the wind to light the flame.

There were many children, each carrying their lantern carefully over the bumpy ground to the water. Men in Wellington boots stood in the water and helped push the lanterns further out to catch the drift. More volunteers, this time in canoes, collected the burnt out lanterns from the water. It was a mesmerising sight to watch the red and white lights bob down the river. A Buddhist ceremony was taking place, so we listened to chanting whilst watching the lanterns blow downstream.

This ‘Peace Message Lantern Floating Ceremony’ is held on the evening of August 6th every year in Hiroshima, and has been since 1947, just two years after the atomic bombing of the city. An estimated 10,000 lanterns are floated down the river in memory of those who have died, and those who continue to suffer as a result of the bomb.