The three-term mayor of Hiroshima who spearheaded a global campaign for nuclear disarmament and a photographer who documented river pollution in his native China are among the 2010 winners of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards. The awards announced Monday are considered Asia's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. They are named after a popular Philippine president who died in a plane crash in 1957.
As a Japanese lawmaker and later Hiroshima mayor, Akiba painfully recognised that his city had the moral obligation to warn the world of the nuclear danger, the Magsaysay Award organisers said. He led a movement called "Mayors for Peace" that includes more than 4,000 cities in 144 countries.
A newspaper photographer from Shenqiu in China's Henan province, Huo Daishan, 56, was so shocked by industrial pollution, poisonous fumes and dead fish in the Huai River China's third-largest that he started to document it, armed with a cheap camera, pen and notebook.
A one-man campaign became a full-time mission for Hou in 1998, when he organised a group called "Guardians of the Huai River" and staged his first exhibit by stringing together on a clothesline photographs of the river along a street in his village.
Other awardees are physicists Christopher Bernido and wife Maria Victoria Carpio-Bernido of the Philippines, who introduced a novel way of teaching science, and Bangladeshi A.H.M. Noman Khan, who set up service-and-training centres for helping persons with disabilities. The awards will be formally presented August 31 in Manila.
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