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My name is Dhamma (JD) Thipsoda. I am a student at Newton Sixth Form School in Thailand and currently spending a year in Japan as an AFS exchange student at Keio Shonan Fujisawa Senior High School.

In August, I had the chance to join the 2026 Hiroshima Global Youth Forum, where 84 high school students from 21 countries came together to discuss peace, international understanding and the role of young people in creating a better future.

I was excited, but also a little nervous. I had never joined a program with students from so many different countries before.

I was assigned to a group with students from Egypt, France and Japan. Once we started talking, it became surprisingly easy to connect. We talked about our schools, opportunities for young people and problems happening around the world. Even though we grew up in very different places, I was surprised by how much we had in common.

The experience I will remember most was listening to Ms Keiko Ogura, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, share her story.

I had learned about Hiroshima from books and school, but it had always felt quite distant to me. I come from Thailand, where nuclear weapons are not something we usually think about in our daily lives. Hearing from someone who had actually experienced the bombing made it completely different from reading about it.

One message from Ms Ogura has stayed with me ever since. She told us that her dream is to see a world without nuclear weapons and that her generation cannot achieve this goal alone. Young people would have to continue the effort. I remember thinking that I had never really considered what someone my age could have to do with an issue as big as nuclear weapons.

During the program, we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Peace Memorial Park. Seeing photographs and personal stories made me think less about dates and historical events and more about the ordinary people whose lives were changed by them.

Before the forum, I thought the experience would mainly be about Hiroshima and the atomic bombing. But I ended up learning just as much from the other students. Sometimes their ideas were different from mine, and I didn't know what to say, so I just listened.

I didn't come back from Hiroshima knowing how to solve something as big as war, but I came back thinking differently about peace. Before the forum, I thought about peace mostly as something between countries and governments. Now I think it can also begin with something smaller things: listening, respecting differences and trying to understand someone whose experience is different from your own. The forum taught me that understanding people from different backgrounds is not as difficult as I once thought. Sometimes all it takes is a conversation.