“We have been tasked with conveying the inhumanity of nuclear weapons, across generations and borders”.
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The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, three days later, are credited by some historians with ending World War II. Another bomb, “Fat Man” was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9. “It carries the threat of nuclear weapons development, and as the 2011 Fukushima disaster demonstrated to the world, nuclear energy is neither safe, nor clean”, said Junichi.
Those who survived suffered horrific injuries, or radiation sickness. “Surely, you will be impelled to start discussing a legal framework, including a nuclear weapons convention”.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says Japan wants to see a world without nuclear weapons.
“We must establish a broad national security framework that does not rely on use of force but is based on trust”, said Matsui.
The hawkish Prime Minister Abe is attempting to restart the country’s nuclear reactors that were shut down following the Fukushima natural disaster and tsunami disaster in 2011. He pledged to promote the cause through global conferences to be held in Hiroshima later this month.
The survivors still remember the horror they encountered, and their biggest fear now is that these memories might wither no one to pass on their stories.
In the past year, 5,359 hibakusha, or survivors, passed away, bringing the death toll to 297,684, according to The Associated Press.
About 55,000 people from 100 countries attended the ceremony in Hiroshima, including U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and Rose Gottemoeller, undersecretary of state for arms control.
Approximately 70 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed.
But a visit to Hiroshima by President Obama himself, which many in Japan hoped would follow, never came – much less an apology by the United States for dropping the bombs.
Surveys have indicated that a majority of the Japanese public is against the move, which involves a reinterpretation of Japan’s war-renouncing constitution, drafted during U.S. occupation after the war.
Abe’s predecessors apologized for Japan’s wartime actions in their statements on the 50th and 60th anniversaries.
At a meeting with Abe in the western Japanese city, representatives of the groups said that the bills are clearly unconstitutional.
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China, which often emphasises its own victimisation at the hands of foreign powers, is itself gearing up to commemorate Japan’s World War II defeat, planning a massive military parade through central Beijing.
