Rise Up! Treaties, Not Bombs!

RISE UP! TREATIES, NOT BOMBS!

Join Toronto’s Peace Commemorations
August 6th, 2019 @ 6:30 pm
Peace Garden at Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto City Hall

Come for a day of art, music, crafts and peace education & attend Toronto’s peace commemorations on the 74th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Hiroshima-Nagasaki Survivor Art & Poster Display: 10 am – 5 pm
Community Tables and Crafts: 4:30 – 6:30 pm
Commemoration: 6:30 – 8:40 pm
Lantern Ceremony: Dusk

All Nations Juniors Drummers * Flute music by Ron Korb * Keynote Address Ray Acheson * Pax Christi Chorale * Raging Grannies * Crafts * Lantern Ceremony

Free and open to the Public
All are Welcome!

TORONTO… Join us August 6th at 4:30 p.m. for crafts and community tables at Nathan Phillips Square. Commemorations begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Peace Garden. The events are free and fully accessible. This year’s events will include the GTA’s own international peace activist Ray Acheson, Director of Reaching Critical Will (the disarmament programme of Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom) and member of the steering committee of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Ms. Acheson, who will be introduced by long-time HNDC member and international peace activist Sestuko Thurlow, was instrumental in developing ICAN’s international movement and bringing the Treaty on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons to the United Nations.

The HNDC is very happy to welcome the All Nations Juniors drum group to Hiroshima-Nagasaki Day for the first time this year. Grammy-nominated flutist Ron Korb, the Pax Christi Chorale and Toronto’s Raging Grannies will also perform on August 6th. The Lantern Ceremony will take place at dusk on the west side of the fountains.

Hiroshima-Nagasaki Survivor Art & Poster Display: August 1 – 8
City Hall Rotunda, 10 am – 5 pm daily
100 Queen St. West

The gut-wrenching Survivor Art and Poster Display depicts the effects of the atomic bombs of 1945 on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their citizens. The accompanying drawings by survivors of the atomic bomb vividly illustrate the horror they witnessed and underscores the devastation that nuclear weapons can bring. In Ground Zero 1945, Pulitzer-prize winning historian John Dower reflects on the survivor drawings: “In 1974 a survivor visited the Hiroshima office of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) to give them a picture he had drawn of a scene from 1945 that still haunted him.…Eventually, several thousand such pictures were collected and exhibited throughout the country…There is nothing like them (Dower, 2005).” Warning: the images are disturbing and may not be suitable for children and those sensitive to violence.

Through the efforts of Setsuko Thurlow, international peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, a selection of these images have come to Toronto in the form of reproductions. These will be on display in the City Hall rotunda as part of a poster exhibition featuring drawings, archival images and educational material on the impacts of nuclear weapons worldwide. Works by contemporary photographers round out the display of historical images. Please join us on August 6th and help us work towards nuclear abolition with peace, reflection, creativity and artistic expression.

About HNDC: The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Day Coalition (HNDC) is a non-partisan coalition of peace, faith and community groups that annually hosts Toronto’s Hiroshima & Nagasaki commemoration ceremony. The HNDC has been standing against nuclear weapons proliferation for over 35 years with a mandate to remind citizens and government that nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to world peace. HNDC advocates for Canada’s adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.

Learn more:

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Don’t Bank on the Bomb

“In Hiroshima, one August morning in 1945 was dark as night–and this woman can’t forget it”
Elizabeth Renzetti, The Globe and Mail, August 5, 2017

“Why Canada should sign the treaty banning nuclear arms”
Douglas Roche, The Globe and Mail on July 29, 2017

PREVENT NUCLEAR WAR and Join the Hibakusha Rebellion!

Toronto City Council Endorses UN Ban Treaty

Media Contact: Vinay Jindal, hiroshimaday@yahoo.ca
hiroshimadaycoalition.ca/
Like us on Facebook

Images:
Design and Cover Photo: Katy McCormick, A-bombed Holly Tree, 740 meters from the hypocenter, Hiroshima, 2013.

Hideo Kimura, (12 at the time of the bombing) “My classmates were screaming,” Hiroshima, August 6, 8:15-8:30 a.m., A-bomb drawing, courtesy of the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum.