Tadatoshi Akiba (秋葉 忠利, Akiba Tadatoshi, born November 3, 1942 in Arakawa, Tokyo) is a Japanese mathematician and politician and served as the mayor of the city of Hiroshima, Japan from 1999 to 2011.
While at Tufts, Akiba established the Hibakusha Travel Grant program, which brought several American print and broadcast journalists annually to Hiroshima in August, to craft stories about the city (and typically about the experiences of those exposed to the atomic bomb in 1945).[1]
Political career
As a member of the Social Democratic Party, he was elected to the House of Representatives, and served from 1990 to 1999. He assumed office as mayor of Hiroshima in February, 1999, and was reelected to this position in 2003 and in April 2007.[2]
On January 21, 2010, he attended the 78th winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors as a special guest speaker, and in that capacity attended the reception held at the White House and met US President Barack Obama.[5] He is so far the only serving Mayor of Hiroshima who has officially met a serving US president.
In August 2010, he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for his advocacy for nuclear disarmament, and in April 2013 he was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal from the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) and the Governing Mayor of Berlin.
Akiba is on the Board of Advisors of the Global Security Institute.
Hiroshima is one place outside the United States where Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed with equal importance as in the United States. Tadatoshi Akiba holds a special banquet at the mayor's office as an act of unifying his city's call for peace with King's message of human rights.[6]
In the new year address on January 4, 2011, Akiba announced he would not run for reelection during the mayoral election scheduled for April 10, 2011. No reasons were given.[8][9] In early April it was reported that Hiroshima University has appointed Akiba as special professor, effective from his retirement as mayor.[10] On April 10, Kazumi Matsui was elected the new Mayor. On August 3, 2012, he was appointed chairman of the Middle Powers Initiative (MPI), an international network of non-governmental organizations working for nuclear disarmament.[11]
Works
Translation
Linear algebra / Ichiro Satake; translated by Sebastian Koh, Tadatoshi Akiba, Shin-ichiro Ihara
^Foard, James (2006). "Vehicles of Memory: The Enola Gay and the Streetcars of Hiroshima". Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place. Indiana University Press. p. 128. ISBN9780253347992.
^"Archived copy". www.nni.nikkei.co.jp. Archived from the original on September 10, 2012. Retrieved February 3, 2022.((cite web)): CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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