Yuki Miyamoto believes her mother died of exposure to radiation from the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
Miyamoto, a DePaul University religion professor who grew up in Hiroshima, said her mother contracted a blood disease in her 30s and died of breast cancer at age 62.
“I don’t want anyone else to suffer like that,” said Miyamoto, who was among demonstrators who gathered in a North Side park Sunday morning to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
About a dozen people affiliated with Global Zero — which seeks non-proliferation of nuclear weapons — rode their bicycles in a seven-mile loop starting at Oz Park near Lincoln and Webster to highlight the size of the blast zone at Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
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Miyamoto has traveled to Hiroshima with her DePaul students. A memorial park on ground zero in Hiroshima is “a scary place to visit,” she said.“It’s ghostly. A lot of people died there.”
People now have cookouts in the park, which was “unthinkable” when she was growing up.
“We don’t want people to forget,” Miyamoto said. “We are co-existing with 15,000 nuclear bombs around the world.”
Maxwell Rejman, 11, was with his parents and younger brother at the demonstration Sunday.
He wore a T-shirt decorated with nuclear bombs with red X’s over them.
“We do not want to live in a world with nuclear weapons,” Maxwell said, adding that he’s spoken about the deadly serious topic at school.
His mom, Gia Biagi, said she joined her parents in a march protesting nuclear armament when she was a girl in 1982 in New York City.
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