HIROSHIMA: Japan has marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing on Hiroshima on Thursday remembering the 297,684 people who died in the deadly bombing.
Mayor Kazumi Matsui renewing calls for U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders to step up efforts toward making a nuclear-weapons-free world.
As many as 10 thousand people stood for a minute of silence at 8:15 a.m. at a ceremony in Hiroshima’s peace park near the epicenter of the 1945 attack, marking the moment of the blast.
Then dozens of doves were released as a symbol of peace.
The U.S. bomb, “Little Boy,” the first nuclear weapon used in war, killed 140,000 people. A second bomb, “Fat Man,” dropped over Nagasaki three days later, killed another 70,000, prompting Japan’s surrender in World War II.
Matsui called nuclear weapons “the absolute evil and ultimate inhumanity” that must be abolished, and criticised nuclear powers for keeping them as threats to achieve their national interests.
He renewed an invitation to world leaders to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki to see the scars themselves, during the G-7 summit in Japan next year.
“President Obama and other policymakers, please come to the A-bombed cities, hear the hibakusha (surviving victims) with your own ears, and encounter the reality of the atomic bombings,” he said. “Surely, you will be impelled to start discussing a legal framework, including a nuclear weapons convention.”
With the average age of survivors now exceeding 80 for the first time this year, passing on their stories is considered an urgent task.
