Tadatoshi
Akiba is mayor of the city of Hiroshima, Japan and President of Mayors for Peace,
a network of mayors in nearly 1800 cities in more than 120 countries, united for
the abolition of nuclear weapons. Mayor Akiba started his professional career
as a mathematics professor in New York and Hiroshima before being elected to the
Japanese House of Representatives in 1990. He served until 1999 when he was elected
as Mayor of Hiroshima, and then re-elected in 2003.
Tadatoshi
Akiba's activism was inspired while he was teaching at Tuft's University in New
York, and heard on a call-in radio show that 90% of listeners thought using the
nuclear bomb was justified during World War II. As Mayor of Hiroshima, one of
two cities, along with Nagasaki, to suffer the devastation of a nuclear bomb,
Tad Akiba is deeply committed to ensuring that the world never again experiences
the horror that reduced his city to rubble and killed hundreds of thousands of
people. In 1982, another Hiroshima Mayor, Takeshi Araki, proposed a program to
bring cities around the world together to abolish nuclear weapons, which eventually
inspired the creation of the non-governmental organization, Mayors for Peace.
Since taking office, Mayor Akiba has taken a leading role in Mayors for Peace.
As President, he has greatly increased the network's size and outreach, and has
done much to bring awareness to Hiroshima's commitment to being an International
Peace Culture City. In addition to being a leading international voice for peace
and nuclear disarmament, Mayor Akiba has championed environmental protection and
government transparency. He has worked hard to clean Hiroshima's rivers and has
vastly increased his city's recycling program so that Hiroshima now produces less
wastes that need to be landfilled or incinerated than any other city in Japan.
For his dedication to a more peaceful, just and sustainable world, Mayor Akiba
has received many honors, including the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's World Citizenship
Award and the Nuclear-Free Future Award.
