Japan marks day atomic bombs fell

Tokyo urged to remember its atrocities during WWII

TOKYO — A bell tolled on Monday in Hiroshima as Japan marked 73 years since the world’s first atomic bombing, with the city’s mayor warning that rising nationalism worldwide threatened peace.

The skies over Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park were clear, just as they were on Aug 6, 1945, when a US B-29 bomber dropped its deadly payload on the port city dotted with military installations, ultimately killing 140,000 people.

Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, standing at the park near ground zero for the annual ceremony, appealed for a world without nuclear weapons and sounded the alarm over increasing nationalism.

“If the human family forgets history or stops confronting it, we could again commit a terrible error. That is precisely why we must continue talking about Hiroshima,” Matsui said.

“Efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons must continue.”

His call, however, highlighted Japan’s contradictory relationship with nuclear weapons.

Japanese officials routinely argue that they oppose atomic weapons but the nation’s defense is dependent on the nuclear umbrella of the United States.

Survivors of the bombing known as hibakusha were also in attendance at the annual ceremony.

Some of the hibakusha, many now aged over 82, have been working with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons on a treaty they hope will be adopted by the United Nations.

However, Japan has not become a signatory to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into effect in July 2017.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his

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message during the ceremony that Hiroshima’s legacy is one of “resilience” and sought continued moral support from the hibakusha for efforts in promoting the ban of nuclear weapons.

But as with years past and, perhaps, for those in the future, while Japan has a tendency to focus solely on the inward tragedy that nuclear and chemical warfare has inflicted on it, many experts on the matter hope that Japan will also take the time to remember that its own involvements in World War II had also brought immeasurable suffering.

Notorious Unit 731

For example, the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious Unit 731, which was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in northeast China at the time, and conducted vivisections on live human beings to test germ-releasing bombs and chemical bombs, among other atrocities.

More than 300,000 people across China were killed by Japan’s biological weapons during World War II.

The unit managed to keep its atrocities largely concealed due to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East not prosecuting commanders on the condition they handed over the germ warfare data to the US.

Right-wing forces in Japan have also attempted to diminished the unit’s activities, even going as far as denying its existence, despite an NHK documentary drawing local and international attention to the travesties and the names and positions of hundreds of those working at the unit being officially released recently.

To accelerate Japan’s surrender in the World War II, the US forces dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively on Aug 6 and Aug 9, 1945.

Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces on Aug 15, a key moment in bringing an end to World War II.