Guin Library

Hideko Tamura Snider, survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, will be coming to campus to give a lecture coinciding with the Nuclear Age exhibit at the Valley Library. The lecture called “Surviving Hiroshima, Blooming Peace” will be on Thursday, October 22 at 7 p.m. in the LaSells Stewart Center. 

Hideko Tamura Snider is a “hibakusha,” a survivor of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Though she survived with injuries, her mother and many thousands of others did not survive. Since 1979, Hideko has been appearing before professional organizations, university classes and community groups across the United States and in her native Japan, telling her story and encouraging people of all cultures and nations to examine the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and to work toward peace and nuclear nonproliferation. 

In this talk, she will speak on the physical, psychological and spiritual effects of the bomb, from the immediate aftermath to more permanent consequences, and will discuss the challenge of peace and of lessons that we have learned from Hiroshima since the war. 

After the publication in 1996 of her memoir, One Sunny Day, Tamura Snider founded One Sunny Day Initiatives, which educates the public about the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and plants seeds of peace, hope and reconciliation among people
of the world through educational presentations and cultural exchange programs.

She is also the author of the children’s book, When a Peace Tree Blooms, and the 2015 Hiroshima Ambassador for Peace. Tamura Snider’s lecture on October 22 is free and open to the public.

The lecture by Tamura Snider is sponsored by the Special Collections and Archives Research Center at OSU’s Valley Library, the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative, the Citizenship and Crisis Initiative, the OSU Holocaust Memorial Program, the School of Language, Culture and Society, and the School of History, Philosophy and Religion.

The exhibit at the Valley Library, “The Nuclear Age: Seventy Years of Peril and Hope,” is on view through March 1, 2016 in the exhibit gallery at the Archives Research Center Reading Room on the library’s fifth floor.