When Japanese immigrants arrive in Toronto, they usually find themselves listening to sound advice and gentle counsel, in their own language, from Setsuko Thurlow, a Canadian social worker.

Thurlow sounds quite different when she speaks at a peace rally or an international conference. Then her voice is not comforting but warning. Setsuko is a survivor of Hiroshima.

From the podium, she paints a verbal picture of hell, seen through the eyes of a stunned child pulled from the wreckage of a burning school house. There are no abstractions here, no talk of 'acceptable losses' or 'megadeaths.' Young Setsuko saw the dying one by one; classmates, sisters, neighbors, people, not statistics.

Given our human habit of avoiding the things we don't want to think about, Thurlow did not endear herself to many North Americans when she came here from Japan. In Virginia, where she did graduate work, she was outspoken and unrelenting in her admonitions that the nuclear arms race must stop.

Then she moved to Toronto. 'Most Canadians and particularly the news media seemed to regard me as a 'human interest' story, but were not willing to identify nuclear weapons as their problem.'

Thurlow points out that Canadian uranium made the bomb that destroyed her city and that Canadians would surely suffer dreadfully in a nuclear war. She will not let people maintain their defensive illusions.

Career, marriage and family took most of her time for some years—her anti-war work being just one part of her life. But then she attended a disarmament conference in Hiroshima. 'I realized that my commitment to resistance to the nuclear arms race must be the central concern of my whole life,' she explains. Children, marriage, career, the community—nothing she loved would survive if there were a nuclear exchange. She describes the shift in her thinking as similar to a religious conversion.

She kept her commitment, giving up the comforts and pleasures of life to speak, write and lobby tirelessly. The enemy, she says, is fear. Fear not simply of a holocaust, but fear of seeming stupid or morbid. Fear traps people in silence and in that silence the possibility of war rolls closer.

Setsuko Thurlow will not be silent. No matter what she must give up or face to keep speaking, she goes on, remembering the plaque that she saw in Hiroshima's Peace Park during that long-ago conference. It said, 'Rest in peace—the error will not be repeated'.

Update:

Setsuko Thurlow continues her tireless efforts for disarmament. One of her many speeches was to the First Committee of the UN General Assembly on October 26, 2011. In August, 2012 Thurlow, along with 600 other Members of the Order of Canada, signed an appeal to their government to support the international elimination of nuclear weapons. She has appeared on many news and talk shows. You can hear her testimony about nuclear war here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5q6kq9nHC4