Hiroshima honours victims of nuclear attack
Survivors, citizens gather to mourn city’s incineration on anniversary of bombing
HIROSHIMA, JAPAN— Every year on Aug. 6, Hiroshima becomes a city of mourning. And one full of reminders — some delivered politely, some pointedly — of the most extreme dangers of modern warfare. Seventy years ago, the city was incinerated by an atomic bomb, its population halved by the new and terrifying U.S. weapon nicknamed Little Boy.
On Thursday, political leaders, aging survivors and ordinary citizens gathered at 8:15 a.m. to mourn the moment when the city unwillingly became part of the world’s introduction to the nuclear age. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, together with another that hit Nagasaki three days later, killed more than 200,000 people, most of them civilians.
At a ceremony near the onetime industrial exhibition hall that has been preserved as a skeletal monument to the attack, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe renewed a long-standing Japanese pledge to seek worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons. The mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, accused “selfish” nuclear powers, including the United States, of standing in the way of that goal.
Abe is pursuing unpopular policies on two issues linked closely in the public’s mind with the bombings: national defence and nuclear energy. Small groups of demonstrators gathered at the edge of the ceremony grounds to protest moves by his government to pare back postwar restrictions on the military and to restart nuclear power plants idled after meltdowns at a plant in Fukushima in 2011.
Kohei Oiwa, an 83-year-old bomb- ing survivor, condemned legislation now before parliament that would allow Japanese forces to fight overseas, in limited situations, for the first time since the war. And he criticized as hypocritical the government’s repeated pledges to help rid the world of nuclear weapons. Japan, he noted, accepts the protection of the United States, its former enemy turned close ally, including the deterrent provided by the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
“Abe’s peace is a phony peace,” Oiwa said as he waited in line to lay a bouquet of flowers in front of an eternal flame.