Hiroshima marks 77th anniversary of A-bomb

TOKYO — Japan marked the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of its western city of Hiroshima on Saturday.

During a memorial ceremony held at the Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui cautioned in the Peace Declaration that dependence on nuclear deterrence is gaining momentum around the world. “We must immediately render all nuclear buttons meaningless,” he said.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres attended the ceremony, warning that a new arms race is accelerating.

“Nuclear weapons are nonsense. They guarantee no safety — only death and destruction,” Guterres said. “Three-quarters of a century later, we must ask what we’ve learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city in 1945.”

A moment of silence was observed at 8:15 am, the exact moment a uranium bomb dropped from a US bomber and detonated over the city on Aug 6, 1945, killing about 140,000 people by the end of the year.

While Japan inwardly looks at the tragedies it had experienced at the end of World War II, historians and political minds of the international community have encouraged Japan to see themselves not merely as victims of the atomic bombings, but also as perpetrators who led to these tragic events to happen in the first place.

Japan brutally occupied many parts of Asia before and during World War II, causing untold suffering and death to hundreds of thousands of innocent victims.

In another development, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will replace Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi based on consideration of his health in the upcoming Cabinet and party leadership reshuffle on Wednesday, Reuters quoted the Yomiuri daily as saying on Saturday.

Kishida pushed forward the reshuffle, originally slated for early September, after a key memorial service for former prime minister Shinzo Abe who was assassinated last month.

The reshuffle would come after Kishida’s conservative coalition government increased its majority in the upper house of parliament in a July election held two days after Abe’s death.

Kishi, 63, a younger brother of Abe, has served as defense minister since September 2020.