On the 15th, the day the war ended, a speech contest was held in Chiran Town, Minamikyushu City, Kagoshima Prefecture, where the younger generation called for the realization of a world without war.
At the end of the Pacific War, Chiran Town in Minamikyushu City was home to one of the largest military suicide bases in Japan, and 439 young men who took off from this base lost their lives.
Due to the influence of the new coronavirus, the speech was canceled last year and was held without an audience last year, but this year it was held with an audience for the first time in three years.
10 junior and senior high school students who were selected in the preliminary screening gave speeches, and among them, Asahi Kisane, a first-year student at Kikai Prefectural High School, looked back on visiting the Kamikaze Peace Center with her great-grandfather, who had volunteered for the Kamikaze Corps. When I asked him about his state of mind, my great-grandfather answered with tears in his eyes, ``I don't know. I would like to pass on to the next generation the image of young people who risked their lives to take flight.”
Miku Morita, a third-year junior high school student in Kagoshima City, also touched on her great-grandmother's father who died in the war, saying, "I hope the day will come when 'the happy thief named war' will disappear from the world and everyone can share their happiness. I will.”
A first-year junior high school girl who visited said, "I felt happy to be able to talk about trivial things with my friends and family."
In addition, a 71-year-old woman said, "I felt that the children were reliable because they were thinking about war and peace from a familiar point of view."