Hiroshima Haiku

Hiroshima Haiku: 30 Poems

Yasuhiko Shigemoto, Osaka, Japan

The number of survivors of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima is dwindling. What have we all learned from this experience?

Yasuhiko Shigemoto was born in Hiroshima in 1930. He was fifteen when he suffered from A-bomb attack on the City in 1945. Having survived it, he later taught English at a senior high school in Osaka, which became his long career of forty-five years.

Meanwhile, he has been engaged in the struggle for peace both at home and abroad. His anthology, My Haiku of Hiroshima, was published in 1995. He has been giving public lectures and speeches on the theme of peace, including the speech he delivered at London University on Hiroshima Haiku also in 1995. He is one of the judges of the annual A-Bomb Memorial Day Haiku Contest* in English. The meeting of this contest is held every year at the Peace Museum of Ritsumeikan Universityin Kyoto.

The A-bomb at Hiroshima is not a past event for Shigemoto but very much of the present and will continue to be so unless and until all the nuclear weapons are eradicated from the face of the earth. His haiku poems are a testimony to it.

World Haiku Review presents 30 Hiroshima haiku by Yasuhiko Shigemoto below and on the following pages:

HIROSHIMA HAIKU

30 poems

Yasuhiko Shigemoto