On the morning of August 6, 1945, eighteen-year-old NOBORU IWAMURA was busy conducting an experiment in the laboratory of the Hiroshima Institute of Engineering and Technology when the atomic bomb exploded just 1.2 kilometers away. Heavy cement walls collapsed over him. Three days later rescue workers found him alive beneath the debris. Of his classmates, only he survived. Contemplating the loss of his friends and the miracle of his own survival, IWAMURA resolved to become a doctor and to live his life for others.
IWAMURA undertook his medical training at Tottori University School of Medicine and, in 1958, joined its faculty as an associate professor. In 1960 he applied to go abroad with the Japan Overseas Christian Medical Cooperative Service. With his wife, IWAMURA spent the next eighteen years in Nepal. Working at first in the city of Kathmandu, he learned that many of his patients reached the hospital after trekking great distances and, all too often, only when their diseases were already fatally advanced. Why should sick people imperil themselves trying to reach me, he wondered, when I, a healthy doctor, can go to them?
IWAMURA became a “barefoot doctor,” striking out on foot and on horseback into the mountain fastnesses where many Nepalis dwelled without benefit of medical services and where tuberculosis was pandemic. In time he came to understand the relationship between the sickness of villagers and their poverty end ignorance. IWAMURA began experimenting with public health and livelihood projects. In doing so, he encountered a cardinal truth of rural development: “Uplift” programs driven solely by outside donors and specialists are bound to fail. Only when such efforts are geared toward self-reliance and when these are led by dedicated people from within the communities themselves do they truly succeed and endure.
In 1980, having returned to Japan, IWAMURA joined the International Center for Medical Cooperation at the Kobe University School of Medicine. From 1985 to 1987 he led a Japanese government team assisting in primary health care in Thailand. By this time IWAMURA had traveled throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America and discovered the ubiquity of the sort of poverty he had first encountered in Nepal. Yet to IWAMURA, the Japanese seemed to be enjoying lives of abundance without being aware of their country’s relationship to its poorer Asian neighbors, or its dependence upon them. Calling upon the insights of his years in Nepal and Thailand, he began guiding the philanthropic instincts of his fellow Japanese to focus on urgent needs abroad, and on modest but practical ways in which these needs can be met.
In 1980 IWAMURA founded the Peace, Health, and Human Development Foundation (PHD) to bring grass-roots community leaders from Nepal and Southeast Asia to Japan for technical training. And in 1985 he established the International Human Resources Institute to sponsor young rural development workers for their master’s degrees in Community Development at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and Los Banos. IWAMURA takes a personal interest in choosing students for the program, prizing above all those candidates who are committed to carry on in community work and who possess a missionary spirit.
Fearing the genetic consequences of the nuclear blast, the Iwamuras chose to have no children of their own. While in Nepal, however, they raised and educated twelve Nepali orphans. These children are grown now. And it is with them, each year in Nepal, that 66-year-old IWAMURA celebrates Christmas.
In electing NOBORU IWAMURA to receive the 1993 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes his heeding the call of the true physician in a lifetime of service to Japan’s Asian neighbors.
