At 8:15 a.m. Thursday – the moment in 1945 that the Little Boy uranium bomb was dropped – tens of thousands in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park stood in silence to honor the dead.
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The bombings are credited with ending World War Two.
“Little Boy“, dropped from the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, destroyed 90 per cent of the city and killed an estimated 140,000 people, including those who succumbed to injuries and radiation sickness in the ensuing weeks.
“And that resolve translates in us proposing a new draft resolution at the United Nations in the fall on nuclear disarmament”, Prime Minister Abe pledged.
“For example, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum ranked number one… for the ranking of “the most popular tourist spots in Japan for foreign tourists” at the travel website TripAdvisor two years in a row”. “We have to continue our effort to achieve a world without nuclear weapons“.
Mr Matsui called the nuclear weapons “the ultimate inhumanity and the absolute evil” that must be abolished.
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.
Reuters reports that a government report issued Thursday acknowledges that Japan’s “reckless war” did great damage in Asia, but Abe reportedly has taken issue with the term “aggression” to describe his country’s actions. Three days later, another plane dropped a second atomic bomb over the city of Nagasaki.
More ceremonies follow Sunday, in Nagasaki, but amid the solemnity of those events, many across the region are waiting to hear what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will say to mark Japan’s surrender.
A nuclear historian has created a map visualizing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb explosions would look like in different cities around the world, as reported by The Washington Post. Ogura said, “Some people in the world still do not understand the cruelty of nuclear weapons”.
“The impression of Hiroshima that visitors take away seems to be affected by whether they have had the opportunity to meet and communicate with local people”, Abe said. Any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic consequences. (The thinking was that any attempt to invade Japan through conventional means would result in too many American casualties.) Moreover, the devastating effects of radiation poisoning weren’t fully understood prior to the fallout in Hiroshima.
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“It’s a reminder, a remembrance, and also it should be hoping for a peaceful future”.
