There’s a photograph that went viral in May 2016. In it, a frail elderly Japanese man is wrapped in the arms of the President of the United States, both of them standing in the shadow of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. The old man’s eyes were full of tears. The moment felt almost too human to belong to the world of international diplomacy.
That man was Shigeaki Mori. And his story — a story of survival, obsession, compassion, and one of the most unusual friendships in modern history — is far bigger than a single photograph.
Mori wasn’t just an atomic bomb survivor. He was a self-taught historian who spent over four decades of his private life researching and honoring twelve American prisoners of war who died in the same blast that nearly killed him. He worked extra jobs to pay for a memorial plaque. He wrote letters to strangers in a language he didn’t speak. He fought Japanese bureaucracy, social stigma, and financial ruin — all for soldiers who had been his country’s enemy.
If you’ve ever wondered who Shigeaki Mori was and why his life mattered so deeply to people on both sides of the Pacific, you’re in the right place. This is his full biography.
Who Was Shigeaki Mori?
Shigeaki Mori (森 重昭, read in Japanese as Mori Shigeaki) was a Japanese historian, atomic bomb survivor, and peace advocate who was born on March 29, 1937, in Hiroshima, Japan. He became globally known for his decades-long research into twelve American prisoners of war who perished in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 — alongside the tens of thousands of Japanese victims.
His work led to the creation of a memorial plaque, the official registration of the American soldiers as atomic bomb victims, the publication of a prize-winning book, and eventually a celebrated documentary film. But perhaps the thing that touched the most people was the image of then-U.S. President Barack Obama embracing him at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park in May 2016.
Mori passed away on March 14, 2026, at the age of 88, at a hospital in Hiroshima. Even in his final days, he never stopped speaking about the urgency of peace and the dangers of nuclear weapons.
Quick Facts at a Glance
- Full Name: Shigeaki Mori (森 重昭)
- Born: March 29, 1937, Hiroshima, Japan
- Died: March 14, 2026, Hiroshima, Japan (age 88)
- Occupation: Historian, peace activist, author
- Known For: Researching 12 American POWs killed in Hiroshima; viral hug with President Obama (2016)
- Book: “The Secret of the American POWs Killed by the Atomic Bomb” (2008)
- Award: Kikuchi Kan Prize
- Documentary: Paper Lanterns (2016)
- Spouse: Kayoko Mori (also a hibakusha)
- Children: Two
Early Life in Hiroshima — Growing Up in a City on the Edge of History
Childhood Before the Bomb
Shigeaki Mori was born into what was, for a brief time, an ordinary childhood in Hiroshima. He grew up in a city that was, by the early 1940s, one of Japan’s most important military industrial centers — though as a young boy, the meaning of that would have been lost on him. He went to school, played with friends, and lived the relatively simple life of a wartime Japanese child.
One detail that would later seem almost miraculous in hindsight: shortly before August 6, 1945, young Shigeaki transferred to a different school. All the children in the building of his former elementary school would be killed that morning. He survived partly by chance, partly by timing.
He was eight years old when the world ended and began again on the same day.
August 6, 1945 — The Morning That Changed Everything
At approximately 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the United States Army Air Forces B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb called “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. The bomb detonated at about 600 meters above the city center, instantly generating temperatures approaching the surface of the sun and destroying everything within a radius of roughly two kilometers.
Shigeaki Mori was about 2.5 kilometers from the hypocenter — the point directly beneath the explosion — at the time of the blast. He was near a hill close to his school to the northwest of the city. The force of the detonation threw him into a stream, and he found himself engulfed in darkness that descended like a curtain across the city.
“I was about 2.5 kilometers from the center of the blast,” he recalled in later interviews. “The blast threw me into a stream and then I found myself inside the mushroom cloud. It was so dark that when I held my hands up about 10 centimeters in front of my face, I couldn’t see them.”
He pulled himself out of the water. And then he saw what the bomb had done to the people around him.
What Mori Witnessed Walking Through the Ruins
The scenes Mori encountered after crawling out of the water were the kinds of things that permanently alter a person. He was a child — just eight years old — surrounded by devastation he had no framework for understanding.
He recalled a woman tottering toward him with blood covering her body, internal organs exposed through wounds in her abdomen. She asked him where she could find a hospital. He ran away, crying, unable to help.
“People who were still alive were collapsed all around me,” he said. “I escaped by stamping on their faces and heads. I heard screams from a broken-down house. But I ran away as I was still a child with no power to help.”
That guilt — the guilt of running, of surviving, of being a child who couldn’t save anyone — stayed with him for the rest of his life. In many ways, everything he did afterward was shaped by what he saw on that morning and what he was unable to do.
The atomic attack on Hiroshima killed an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people instantly. By the end of December 1945, the death toll from burns, injuries, and radiation poisoning had climbed to approximately 140,000.
Life as a Hibakusha — Carrying the Weight of Survival
What the Word “Hibakusha” Really Means
In Japan, atomic bomb survivors are called hibakusha (被爆者) — literally, “explosion-affected people.” This term isn’t just descriptive. For much of postwar Japan, it carried a social stigma. Hibakusha were sometimes discriminated against in employment and marriage markets, feared by others who didn’t fully understand radiation exposure, and left to navigate their trauma largely on their own.
The Japanese government only formally began providing medical support and welfare to hibakusha in 1957 — twelve years after the bombing.
The Guilt and Silence That Followed for Many Survivors
Many hibakusha spent the postwar decades in silence about what they had experienced. There was a cultural expectation to move forward, to rebuild, not to dwell. There was also the complicated emotional reality of survivor’s guilt — the question every survivor eventually asks themselves: why did I live when so many others didn’t?
For some, silence was survival. Talking about the bomb meant reliving it.
How Mori Chose a Different Path
Mori chose differently. He didn’t push his memories down. Instead, he became deeply interested in the history of what had happened to Hiroshima. He worked as a regular company employee like millions of other Japanese men of his generation — but in his private hours, he began reading everything he could about the bombing.
He wasn’t trained as a historian. He had no university degree in history, no institutional backing, and no research funding. He was, in every formal sense, an amateur. But he had something more powerful: a personal obsession fueled by a morning he could never forget.
The Discovery That Launched a 40-Year Mission
The Government Document That Started It All
Sometime in the 1970s, roughly three decades after the bombing, Mori was working his way through historical records related to Hiroshima when he came across something that stopped him cold. A brief mention in a government document referenced the presence of American prisoners of war in the city at the time of the bombing.
American soldiers. In Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945.
He read it again. It was real.
The details were sparse — just a passing reference, easy to overlook. But Mori couldn’t overlook it. He became consumed by a question that had never, to his knowledge, been publicly addressed: what had happened to those men? Did their families know? Were they remembered anywhere?
The answer to all of these questions, he would discover, was no.
The Shocking Truth — American Soldiers Died in the Same Blast
As Mori dug deeper, the picture became clearer and more devastating. Twelve American servicemen — captured in the weeks before the bombing — had been held as prisoners of war in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. Ten of them died that same day. Two others survived the immediate blast but died from radiation poisoning within two weeks.
The bomb that killed them was dropped by their own country.
They had no memorial. Their names were not in any registry. Their families back in the United States had been given vague or incomplete accounts of how they had died. In official Japanese memory, these men simply did not exist.
Mori found this unbearable. Not because they were Americans. Not because of politics or wartime allegiance. But because they were human beings who had died without acknowledgment, and their families were still grieving in silence.
“The research I spent more than 40 years on was not about people from the enemy country,” he said years later. “It was about human beings.”
Where the 12 POWs Were Being Held: The Chugoku Military Police Headquarters
The twelve Americans had been held at the Chugoku Military Police Headquarters in central Hiroshima. The building sat just approximately 400 meters from the explosion’s hypocenter — an almost incomprehensible proximity to the center of a nuclear detonation. At that distance, there was essentially no chance of survival when the bomb fell.
The American Airmen — Who Were the 12 POWs?
The Lonesome Lady and the Taloa — Two Bombers Shot Down
The story of the twelve American POWs in Hiroshima began in the skies over Japan in late July 1945. Two U.S. Army Air Forces B-24 Liberator bombers — the Lonesome Lady and the Taloa — were participating in air raids over Japanese targets when they were shot down. Two U.S. Navy dive bombers were also lost in raids around the same period.
Not all the crew members of these aircraft survived being shot down. But those who did were captured, and most were eventually transported to Hiroshima — the largest nearby city — and placed under military custody.
The Chugoku Military Police Headquarters became their prison. They had been held there since July 28, 1945 — just nine days before the bomb.
The Fate of the Crews
Of the captured airmen brought to Hiroshima, ten died on August 6 in the blast itself. The headquarters building, sitting just 400 meters from ground zero, offered no protection against the force and heat of Little Boy. The other two men — injured in the blast — died within the following two weeks from radiation poisoning and wounds.
Their deaths were recorded by Japanese authorities at the time. But those records stayed buried, untranslated, and largely inaccessible to the American families waiting for answers on the other side of the Pacific.
Thomas Cartwright — The Pilot Who Lived
One man associated with the Lonesome Lady survived. First Lieutenant Thomas Cartwright was the pilot of the aircraft. After being shot down and captured, Cartwright was separated from his fellow crew members and sent to Tokyo for interrogation rather than being transported to Hiroshima with the others.
That transfer to Tokyo saved his life. His crewmates died in the bomb that destroyed their captors’ headquarters. Cartwright spent the rest of his life knowing he was alive because of a bureaucratic decision made by his captors.
Mori would eventually locate Cartwright and build a deep, lasting friendship with him — exchanging over a hundred letters across more than two decades. In 2004, Mori translated Cartwright’s own book about the Lonesome Lady POWs into Japanese, and the two men collaborated for years to tell the story of what had happened to Cartwright’s fellow airmen. Tom Cartwright died in 2014 at the age of 90, and Mori grieved him deeply.
Mori’s 40-Year Research Journey — The Sacrifices Nobody Talks About
Researching While Working Full-Time
Mori was not a professional researcher. He had a full-time job as a company employee and did his historical work entirely in his private time — evenings, weekends, and whatever hours he could carve out of an ordinary working life. He had no research grants. No university affiliation. No team of assistants.
He combed through thousands of wartime documents and drawings. He navigated the tangled bureaucracy of postwar Japan, trying to access military records that weren’t designed to be accessed by private citizens. He worked systematically, building his knowledge piece by piece over years and then decades.
The Financial and Personal Cost of His Mission
One of the most striking aspects of Mori’s story — one that barely gets mentioned in the news coverage of him — is what the work cost him personally. To fund a ceremonial memorial plaque honoring the twelve Americans, he took on extra jobs on top of his regular employment. He paid out of his own pocket to have the plaque created and installed near the site where the POWs had been held.
No government paid for it. No charity funded it. One Japanese man — who was supposed to regard these men as the enemy — spent his own money so that strangers from another country could have something to grieve over.
Hostility From His Own Community
Mori also faced something that rarely gets discussed: skepticism and outright contempt from some of his fellow Japanese. There were people around him who simply could not understand why he would dedicate so much of his life to honoring men who had been, technically, the enemy — the very nation that had dropped the bomb on his city and nearly killed him.
Why should a Hiroshima survivor care about American airmen? Why bring up something that complicated the simple moral clarity of Japan as victim? Mori’s answer was always the same: because they were people. Because their families were in pain. Because deserving to be remembered doesn’t depend on which uniform you wore.
Writing Letters to American Families in a Language He Didn’t Speak
Mori didn’t speak English. He’d never learned it growing up, and his research had taken place entirely in Japanese-language documents. And yet, one by one, he tracked down the bereaved families of the twelve American POWs in the United States and wrote to them.
He enlisted the help of others to translate. He reached out across the Pacific to people who had been grieving for decades without knowing the full story of how their sons, brothers, and husbands had died. He sent them what he had learned. He offered what closure he could.
In many cases, these were the first detailed accounts American families had ever received about what had happened to their loved ones.
Building a Memorial — Making Sure the World Never Forgot
Getting the POWs Registered as Atomic Bomb Victims
One of Mori’s central goals — and one of his greatest achievements — was getting the twelve American POWs officially registered as victims of the atomic bomb. This recognition meant that their names would be recorded in Hiroshima’s official memorials alongside the Japanese victims.
It required years of pushing through bureaucratic resistance. But Mori was nothing if not persistent. His research eventually led to U.S. governmental confirmation of the deaths of the twelve captured American service members, and their names were ultimately added to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall’s atomic bomb victims register.
Erecting a Physical Plaque Near the Hypocenter
On top of the memorial registration, Mori worked — at his own expense — to install a physical plaque near the location where the Americans had been imprisoned. It was a modest marker, but it was real and tangible. Passersby in Hiroshima could stop and read the names of American soldiers who had died in the same blast that the city commemorates every August 6.
No one else had made sure those names existed in that space. Mori made it happen.
His Friendship With Tom Cartwright Over Two Decades
Of all the human stories woven through Mori’s research, the friendship with Tom Cartwright stands apart. Here were two men on opposite sides of one of history’s most defining conflicts — the Japanese survivor of the blast, and the American pilot whose crewmates had died in it — who became, over more than twenty years of correspondence, genuine friends.
They wrote letters. They collaborated on translating each other’s work. They shared a mutual dedication to making sure that what happened to those twelve young airmen would not be forgotten. When Cartwright died in 2014, Mori received an invitation to attend his remembrance ceremony in Moab, Utah — though the remote location made travel too difficult at his age.
The friendship between these two men is one of the most quietly extraordinary stories of post-World War II reconciliation that most people have never heard.
The Book That Made the World Listen
“The Secret of the American POWs Killed by the Atomic Bomb” — What the Book Is About
After decades of research, Mori compiled his findings into a full book. Published in Japanese in 2008 under the title Genbaku de shinda Beihei Hishi (原爆で死んだ米兵秘史), the book laid out the complete story of the twelve American prisoners of war — who they were, where they came from, how they ended up in Hiroshima, and what happened to each of them on August 6, 1945.
The book also chronicled Mori’s own journey: the research process, the families he’d contacted, the bureaucratic hurdles he’d overcome, and the memorial he’d built. It was decades of one man’s life compressed into a narrative that the world had simply never heard before.
Mori’s childhood friend Paul Satoh — a Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University — helped locate Tom Cartwright and later worked on translating the book into English. Retired teacher Yukako Ibuki joined the translation effort, and the final edited English version was published online at no charge, making it freely accessible to readers worldwide.
Winning the Prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize
The book earned Mori one of Japan’s most respected literary honors: the Kikuchi Kan Prize. Named after the early twentieth-century Japanese writer Kikuchi Kan, the prize is awarded by the Japan Magazine Publishers Association and recognizes exceptional contribution to Japanese culture and literature.
For an amateur historian with no academic credentials, working alone and largely unsupported, winning the Kikuchi Kan Prize was an extraordinary validation. It signaled to Japan that what Mori had spent his life doing was not the eccentric obsession of a strange man — it was important history.
Translating the Book Into English
Getting the book into English was itself a labor of love. A team including Dr. Paul Satoh, Yukako Ibuki, and editor Mark Shavers — a family friend of Tom Cartwright whose work involved cancer risk assessments for NASA astronauts — worked together to produce the English version. It was eventually published as a free, web-based text at hiroshima-pows.org, where anyone in the world could read it without paying anything.
Mori wanted the story told. He wasn’t in it for money or fame.
Paper Lanterns — The Documentary That Brought Mori to the World
How Barry Frechette Discovered Mori’s Story
The path that led American filmmaker Barry Frechette to Shigeaki Mori began with a family connection. Frechette’s great-uncle was friends with one of the twelve American POWs who died in Hiroshima. In 2012, Frechette came across a family scrapbook containing a photograph of a young man who had died in the blast — and he became captivated.
As he researched the story online, a common thread kept appearing. One name kept coming up as the person who had done all the work of identifying these men and tracing their families: Shigeaki Mori.
Frechette traveled to Japan, filmed initial research footage at Mori’s home in Hiroshima, and eventually co-directed a documentary alongside Max Esposito — originally brought on as cinematographer — who became a full creative partner by the time the film was completed.
What the Film Covers
Paper Lanterns is a roughly sixty-minute documentary that centers on Mori’s forty-year project to identify, memorialize, and bring closure to the families of the twelve American POWs killed in Hiroshima. It traces the stories of individual airmen — particularly Normand Brissette and Ralph Neal — and follows Mori as he connects with surviving family members.
The film captures something that pure text struggles to convey: the emotional weight of what Mori’s work actually meant to the families he found. For people who had spent decades with incomplete or false information about how their fathers and brothers had died, Mori’s letters and eventual visits were life-changing.
Festival Recognition and Global Impact
Paper Lanterns was an official selection at the 2016 Hiroshima International Film Festival, the 2016 United Nations Association Film Festival, and the 2016 Independent Film Festival of Boston. It toured screens across Japan and the United States, and it was the documentary’s growing profile that eventually brought Mori to the attention of U.S. government officials — ultimately leading to the moment in Hiroshima that the whole world saw.
The Hug Heard Around the World — Obama in Hiroshima, 2016
How Mori Got His Seat at Obama’s Historic Speech
On May 27, 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. It was a deeply symbolic visit, months in the making, and the White House was keenly aware of its historical weight.
Mori’s presence at the ceremony wasn’t guaranteed. According to journalist Emi Doi, who had interviewed Mori, he didn’t even expect to attend. He had told her just days before that he planned to watch the event on television. But Ambassador Caroline Kennedy had come across his story through the Paper Lanterns documentary and was moved by it. Working with American officials, arrangements were made for Mori to be there.
He was seated among the small group of survivors and guests who would witness Obama’s speech in person.
What Obama Said About Mori
In his speech at the Peace Memorial Park, Obama mentioned “a dozen Americans held prisoner” as being among the victims of the atomic bombing — a public acknowledgment that had never before come from a sitting U.S. president. He recognized Mori by name for seeking out the families of those Americans and for insisting their loss was equal to every other loss in Hiroshima.
Obama said of Mori: he had “survived the war, had taken the time to find families of American POWs who had also died, insisted that their names be enshrined so that they were recognized.”
What Happened When They Embraced
After the speech, Obama made his way through the gathered survivors and guests. When he reached Mori, the president shook his hand. Then, according to Mori’s own account afterward, the president gestured as though he was going to give him a hug.
So they hugged.
The image of that embrace — an 88-year-old Japanese atomic bomb survivor and the American president, wrapped around each other in the shadow of the memorial — became one of the most widely shared photographs of Obama’s presidency. It went viral almost immediately.
Mori’s Own Words on That Moment
Mori spoke about the embrace in the days that followed, and what he said revealed the depth of what that moment meant to him — not just personally, but for the purpose he had devoted his life to.
“May 27, 2016 is a day I will never forget,” he said. “On that day, the President and I understood each other completely. I think the American POWs realized then that their sacrifices had contributed to the achievement of peace, that they were not just victims, but heroes. This had finally been acknowledged, after 71 years.”
And then he said something that puts into words what the image could only imply: “When the President hugged me, he was hugging all the people who lost their lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a message of the preciousness of peace.”
Shigeaki Mori’s First Trip to America in 2018
After a lifetime spent researching Americans he’d never met and writing to families across the Pacific, Shigeaki Mori finally made his first-ever trip to the United States in May 2018 — at the age of 81.
He traveled to Boston to visit the grave of one of the fallen American servicemen alongside that man’s relatives. He stood at a graveside in a country he had never set foot in before and paid his respects to a soldier who had died in Mori’s city more than seven decades earlier.
He also attended a screening of Paper Lanterns at the United Nations Headquarters in New York — a full-circle moment given that the film had been shown at the U.N. Association Film Festival two years earlier and had helped bring his work to the attention of U.S. officials who arranged his seat at Obama’s speech.
The trip was made possible in part through a GoFundMe campaign organized by Barry Frechette — another reminder of how much of Mori’s extraordinary life was funded not by institutions, but by people who simply believed his work mattered.
Shigeaki Mori’s Family — Kayoko, His Children, and Hiroshima Home
Shigeaki Mori spent his life in Hiroshima, the same city that had shaped everything about him. He lived there with his wife, Kayoko Mori, and they had two children together.
Kayoko is herself a hibakusha — she, too, survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a young child, though she was too young at the time to retain clear memories of the experience. The Moris built their life together in the shadow of a shared history that defined an entire generation of Hiroshima survivors.
Mori carried a framed photograph of Thomas Cartwright — the Lonesome Lady’s pilot — to many of his speaking engagements. It was a small, symbolic gesture that said everything about the man he was: someone who kept his friends, and his purpose, close to him always.
Mori’s Legacy and His Message to the World
A Voice for Nuclear Disarmament
Mori was not simply a historian. He was a peace advocate who believed, with everything he had, that the world needed to understand the full human cost of nuclear weapons — not in abstract numbers, but in individual faces and stories.
His work was an act of radical empathy. He looked at the men who had been dropped from the sky to destroy his city and saw not enemies but human beings. He looked at their grieving families and felt the same obligation to them that he felt to his fellow Japanese. He spent his life insisting that being on the losing side of a war doesn’t give you a monopoly on suffering.
Just days before his death in March 2026, he reportedly warned that the world seemed to be on the brink of another nuclear catastrophe. He died still sounding the same alarm he had been sounding his entire adult life.
Why His Story Still Matters Today
There are more atomic bomb survivors alive today than most people realize. But that number shrinks every year. Mori’s generation — the hibakusha who experienced August 6, 1945 as children and young people — are reaching the end of their lives. When they are gone, the direct human memory of those bombings will be gone with them.
Mori understood this. It’s part of why he was so determined to get his research into writing, into a documentary, into the public record. He wanted the story of those twelve Americans — and by extension the story of what nuclear weapons actually do to human beings — to outlast him.
It will.
Shigeaki Mori Death — Passing of a Living Legend in 2026
How and When He Died
Shigeaki Mori died on March 14, 2026, at a hospital in Hiroshima, Japan. He was 88 years old. The editors of the English translation of his book confirmed his passing on the hiroshima-pows.org website, marking the moment with a tribute that captured the spirit of the man.
“More than 80 years after walking into and forever facing the nuclear holocaust in Hiroshima that predestined his profoundly meaningful life,” they wrote, “Mori-san completed his childhood journey with a final, peaceful crossing of the bridge. Our beloved friend passed away at 5:42 p.m., 14 March, 2026, and is dearly missed.”
The phrase “crossing of the bridge” was deliberate. It echoed the moment in 1945 when a young boy had been thrown from a bridge into a river by the force of an atomic blast — and had somehow survived.
Tributes From Around the World
News of Mori’s death traveled quickly. Media outlets across Japan, the United States, and the rest of the world published obituaries and tributes. The coverage consistently highlighted two things: the hug with Obama in 2016, and the four decades he had spent ensuring that twelve American soldiers were not forgotten.
The South China Morning Post noted that he had died “just days after warning that the world seems on the brink of another nuclear catastrophe” — a reminder that his peace advocacy never stopped, right up to the end.
Frequently Asked Questions About Shigeaki Mori
Who was Shigeaki Mori? Shigeaki Mori was a Japanese historian and atomic bomb survivor from Hiroshima who spent over 40 years researching and memorializing twelve American prisoners of war killed in the Hiroshima bombing on August 6, 1945. He was born on March 29, 1937, and died on March 14, 2026, at age 88.
Why did Obama hug Shigeaki Mori at Hiroshima? During his historic May 2016 visit to Hiroshima — the first by a sitting U.S. president — Barack Obama met Mori at the Peace Memorial Park. Obama had mentioned in his speech the “dozen Americans held prisoner” who died in the bomb, acknowledging Mori’s lifelong research. After the speech, the two embraced in a moment captured in photographs that circulated worldwide.
What book did Shigeaki Mori write? Mori authored “The Secret of the American POWs Killed by the Atomic Bomb,” originally published in Japanese in 2008 under the title Genbaku de shinda Beihei Hishi. The book won the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize in Japan and was later translated into English and made available for free online.
How did Shigeaki Mori survive the atomic bomb? Mori was about 2.5 kilometers from the bomb’s hypocenter when it detonated, putting him just barely outside the zone of instant death. The blast threw him from a bridge into a stream. He crawled out and walked through the destroyed city before eventually making it to safety, though he witnessed horrific scenes of the wounded and dead along the way.
What happened to the 12 American POWs in Hiroshima? Twelve U.S. servicemen — captured from several downed American aircraft in late July 1945 — were held at the Chugoku Military Police Headquarters, just 400 meters from the bomb’s hypocenter. Ten died instantly on August 6, 1945. Two others survived the blast but died from radiation poisoning within two weeks. Mori spent over 40 years researching their identities, tracing their families, and securing their official recognition as atomic bomb victims.
What is the Paper Lanterns documentary about? Paper Lanterns is a 2016 documentary film co-directed by Barry Frechette and Max Esposito. It tells the story of Shigeaki Mori’s decades-long mission to identify, honor, and bring closure to the families of the twelve American POWs who died in the Hiroshima bombing. The film was an official selection at several major film festivals and played a key role in bringing Mori to international attention.
What prize did Shigeaki Mori win? Mori won the Kikuchi Kan Prize — one of Japan’s most respected cultural and literary awards — for his 2008 book on the American POWs killed in Hiroshima. The prize was a significant recognition for a man who had no formal academic training and conducted all his research entirely on his own time.
When and how did Shigeaki Mori die? Shigeaki Mori died on March 14, 2026, at a hospital in Hiroshima, Japan. He was 88 years old. He had reportedly been unwell in his final weeks, and tributes poured in from around the world after his passing was confirmed by editors of the English translation of his book.