The city of Nagasaki has marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing with calls to abolish nuclear weapons and halt the Japanese government’s push to loosen restrictions on what its military can do.
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The legislation, now in the Upper House after the ruling parties pushed it through the Lower House last month, would greatly expand the role of the Self-Defense Forces overseas by loosening the limits imposed on them by the war-renouncing Constitution.
“I urge the government of Japan to listen to these voices of unease and concern”, Taue said.
‘As the only country ever attacked by an atomic bomb… we have a mission to create a world without nuclear arms, ‘ Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the crowd.
Sumitery Taniguchi, 86, was 16 when the bomb incinerated thousands of the city’s buildings and people – and left survivors with lifelong scars.
The main highlight of the ceremony was how a speech by a survivor and also Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue slammed PM Shinzo Abe’s new legislation limiting Japan’s military to self defence.
The US ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, was accompanied by the undersecretary for arms control and worldwide security, Rose Gottemoeller.
Asked, “Do you assume the United States ought to formally apologize to the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb assaults in 1945?” the majority of Japanese stated it ought to.
At least 70, 000 souls were killed when the US dropped a plutonium bomb named “Fat Man” at 11:02 am on Nagasaki, just three days after a bombing on Hiroshima had killed 1,40, 000.
It will be turned back on after a two-year hiatus following the tsunami-sparked disaster at Fukushima in 2011. Nagasaki had a population of 240,000 people in 1945.
Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, brought an end to the Second World War.
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The number of hibakusha in and outside Japan – those with documents certifying they were atomic bomb survivors – stood at 183,519 in March this year, almost half of the peak of 372,264 in 1980, according to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.
