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HIROSHIMA: Since the age of seven, Japanese schoolboy Shun Sasaki has been offering free guided tours to foreign visitors of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with a mission: ensuring that the horrors of nuclear war do not fade from memory with the passage of time.
Aged 12 now, Shun has conveyed that message to some 2,000 visitors, recounting in his imperfect but confident English the experiences of his great-grandmother, a ‘hibakusha’ who survived the atomic bomb.
“I want them to come to Hiroshima and know about what happened in Hiroshima on August 6,” Shun said in English, referring to the day the bomb was dropped in 1945.
“I want them to know how bad is war and how good is peace. Instead of fighting, we should talk to each other about the good things of each other,” he said.
About twice a month, Shun makes his way to the peace park wearing a yellow bib with the words “Please feel free to talk to me in English!” splashed across the back, hoping to educate tourists about his hometown.
His volunteer work has earned him the honor of being selected as one of two local children to speak at this year’s ceremony to commemorate 80 years since the A-bomb was dropped — its first use in war.
Shun is now the same age as when his great-grandmother Yuriko Sasaki was buried under rubble when her house, about 1.5 km (0.9 mile) from the hypocenter, collapsed from the force of the blast. She died of colorectal cancer aged 69 in 2002, having survived breast cancer decades earlier.
The uranium bomb instantly killed about 78,000 people and by the end of 1945 the number of dead, including from radiation exposure, reached about 140,000. The US dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9.
Canadian Chris Lowe said Shun’s guided tour provided a level of appreciation that went beyond reading plaques on museum walls.
“To hear that about his family... it surely wrapped it up, brought it home and made it much more personal. So it was outstanding for him to share that,” he said.
Shun said he plans to continue with the tours as long as he can.
“The most dangerous thing is to forget what happened a long time ago… so I think we should pass the story to the next generation, and then, never forget it, ever again.”

VENTSPILS: Fishers do not usually wish for a “perfect storm.” But Latvian boating communities are hoping for exactly that: a rare tempest that might, one day, revive waning stocks of Baltic cod.
Decreasing salinity in the Baltic Sea is robbing the saltwater fish of the conditions it needs to thrive.
And as its population shrinks, so do the fishing traditions that have long characterised villages along Latvia’s 494-kilometer (307-mile) coastline.
The result for the communities in this small EU nation is a drive to reinvent themselves, to survive.
With the European Union steadily cutting allowable catches of Baltic cod, and moving toward a total ban to replenish stocks, towns and villages are diversifying into tourism and seafood processing.
“We launched a new marina for yachting, offered services for sea travelers, and a French investor opened a brand new shipyard for yacht building,” Agris Stulbergs, harbormaster for the port in the village of Engure, explained to AFP.
Leisure boating has become a favored activity in this village, located just 50 kilometers from the capital Riga, and others.
Farther west, in the port city of Ventspils, Juris Petersons, a lifelong seaman, reminisced how Latvian fishers used to bring in lavish hauls of fish highly valued in kitchens from Russia to Britain.
“Back in the mid-80s the Latvian fishing fleet brought in 55,000 tons of Baltic cod, in addition to salmon, herring and many other saltwater fish,” he said.
Now “the environmental conditions have become so unfavorable to cod growth that Latvian fishermen are allowed to catch just 16 tons of cod a year,” he said.
“And even that amounts only to the accidental by-catch when we fish for herring,” said Petersons, an industrial fishing boat skipper until he sold off his trawlers last year.
The Baltic Sea is fed by a number of large freshwater rivers. It is connected with the North Sea only through the shallow Danish straits, preventing Atlantic saltwater from entering the Baltic basin.


In order to recover, the cod population would need a rare seastorm, with just the right windspeed at the correct angle to push masses of saltwater into the Baltic Sea.
That “happened at least twice during the previous century, but currently we’re waiting for that perfect storm for the third decade,” Petersons said.
Given the smaller yield, many in the industry have focused on quality over quantity.
“All the fish canning companies... have either gone out of business or turned their production lines into making more valuable export-grade products,” said Janis Megnis, chief of the Roja port administration.
Their high quality herring and anchovy products “can be found today from Walmart in the United States to stores in Australia and Japan,” he said.
Political changes have also affected the industry.
Historically Latvia’s fish processing industry mainly served markets in Russia and Belarus.
But with the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, followed by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the resulting Western sanctions, Latvian fishing companies have been forced to seek other markets.
The biggest importers today are Canada, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Denmark and the UK, according to the agriculture ministry.
New markets include Arab countries and South Africa.


Many families in Latvia’s coastal towns have also turned their former fisheries into guesthouses and vacation destinations or switched from selling raw fish to the more lucrative smoked, prepared and spiced varieties.
“My husband is a fifth-generation fisherman: he goes out to sea for fish, which we then smoke and turn into high-end products,” said Iveta Celkarte, who runs a fishing estate in Berzciems village.
“We also have a family cafe... serving our own seafood,” said Celkarte, who has also become a television and social media personality.
Celkarte offers three-hour tours about the history of traditional fishing, taking visitors on a stroll through dunes to the shore and finishing with a special meal.
“For me it is important to tell people about the traditions of our coast, the history of fishing and the life of previous generations working on the sea” she said.
Aivars Lembergs, a former mayor of Ventspils, said he began turning his city into a manufacturing hub and developing tourism has been key, and is paying off.
The city is seeing many tourists coming in from neighboring Lithuania.
“During summers you’ll sometimes see more Lithuanians on the streets of Ventspils than Latvians, as Lithuania has a very short Baltic coastline, and their tourists come here to enjoy the short Baltic summer,” said Lembergs, who was mayor between 1988 and 2021.