Since 2010, Peace Memorial Museum has been conducting the Online A-bomb Testimonies for Overseas Audiences program, which connects hibakusha in Hiroshima with people around the world to listen to their testimonies.
　The program is available to those who are outside of Japan, and is free of charge as long as there are at least ten people in the audience. Participants can hear directly from hibakusha and interact with them through a question & answer session, all while remaining their own countries.
　In order to continue to deliver the voices of hibakusha to the world even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, online conference tools are becoming increasingly important. Since 2020, the museum has been making further efforts to improve the environment for this purpose. Until 2019, online testimonials had been conducted approximately ten times a year, but in 2020 the number was more than doubled, at 23. The number continued to increase in 2021 and as of the end of August, the program had already been conducted 13 times in eight countries, including the U.S. and Hungary, and around 550 people had heard the stories of the hibakusha.
　The audiences were from different regions, backgrounds, and age groups, including countries with nuclear weapons, countries without nuclear weapons, and countries under the nuclear umbrella.
　An American university professor who applied for the online testimony for the second year in a row said, "These testimonies are the first step in a long dialogue." Students who listened to the testimonies said, "I was shocked by the real stories of those who experienced the atomic bombing, which I cannot learn from books or history classes," and "I was able to learn properly about the effects of nuclear weapons on humans for the first time." There were also comments such as, "Peace in a world with nuclear weapons is impossible," showing encouraging signs that they are trying to think about the role of the younger generation in the future. The comments of these students illustrate how important it is to remember the perspective of each individual person who was under the mushroom cloud when we think about nuclear issues.
　As the hibakusha continue to age, the museum will continue to offer the online environment to ensure that the pandemic does not prevent the handing down of stories from the hibakusha. We will also continue to seek ways to help as many people as possible learn about the horrors of the atomic bombing and think about nuclear issues.