OSLO (Kyodo) -- Terumi Tanaka, a 92-year-old Nagasaki atomic bomb survivor, is a symbolic figure in the antinuclear movement of Nihon Hidankyo, Japan's leading group of atomic bomb survivors and the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

He became a cochair of the group, also known as the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, in 2017 after spending two decades organizing movements as its secretary general, and has vowed to never give up on his wish for nuclear abolition as he carries the will of his predecessors on his shoulders.

Tanaka, who now lives in Niiza near Tokyo, was born in 1932 in Manchuria, a region in present-day northeast China, and moved to Nagasaki in southwestern Japan after his father, who was in the military, died.

He was 13 and at home some 3.2 kilometers from the hypocenter when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

While he did not suffer major injuries, he lost five family members, including an aunt he was close to, and says the images of burned bodies in the devastated city are etched in his memory.

After moving to Sendai in northeastern Japan to work as a researcher at Tohoku University, he joined Nihon Hidankyo in the 1970s. In addition to calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons, the movement requested and received government aid and compensation for hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors.

Being in good health, Tanaka initially considered himself to be a witness of the bombing rather than a hibakusha and worked behind the scenes within the group, wanting to support those who suffered more than him. But he began telling his own experience as the number of hibakusha dwindled over the years.

He made a speech as a representative of hibakusha at the U.N. headquarters for the 2015 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in New York.

Tanaka attended the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo in 2017 when the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was given the accolade for its efforts to achieve the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as Nihon Hidankyo pushed for adoption of the treaty.