Japan marked 80 years ago the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on Wednesday with a ceremony reminiscent of the world’s world, such as Sabre rattling between the United States and Russia holding the nuclear “Doomsay Clock” close to midnight.
A quiet prayer was held at 1 p.m. 08:15 (2315 GMT), the moment the US Aircraft Enola Gay fell “Little Boy” over the western Japanese city on August 6, 1945.
On a swelling morning, hundreds of black -clad officials, students and surviving flowers at Memorial Cenotaph, with the ruins of a dome building in the background, put a sharp reminder of the horrors that unfolded.
In a speech, Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui warned of “an accelerating trend against military structure worldwide” based on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the chaos in the Middle East.
“This development obviously disregards the lessons that the international community should have learned from the tragedies of history,” he said.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said it was Japan’s mission “to take the lead … against a world without nuclear weapons”.
The last death toll of the Hiroshima attack would hit about 140,000 people, killed not only by the colossal explosion and the fireball, but also later of the radiation.
Three days after “Little Boy”, August 9, killed another nuclear bomb 74,000 people in Nagasaki. Imperial Japan surrendered on August 15 and brought an end to World War II.
Today, Hiroshima is a flowering metropolis of 1.2 million, but the attacks live on in the memories of many.
On the threshold of the ceremony, people began to stand up to pay their respect for the victims in front of the Cenotafen.
Before Dawn On Wednesday, families who lost loved ones in the attack also came to pray.
Yoshie Yokoyama, 96, who arrived in a wheelchair with her grandson, told journalists that her parents and grandparents were bomb victims.
“My grandfather died shortly after the bombing while my father and mother both died after developing cancer. My in -laws died too, so my husband couldn’t see them again when he returned from battlefields after the war.
“People are still suffering,” she added.
Wednesday’s ceremony was set to include a record of about 120 countries and regions, including for the first time Taiwanese and Palestinian representatives.
The United States – which have never formally apologized for the bombing – were represented by its ambassador to Japan. Russia and China were absent.
Nihon Hidankyo, the grassroots organization, which last year won the Nobel Peace Prize, represents the dwindling number of survivors known as Hibakusha.
From March, there were 99,130 Hibakusha according to the Japanese Ministry of Health with the average age of 86.
“I want foreign broadcasts to visit the Peace Memorial Museum and understand what happened,” the group’s co -chairman Toshiyuki Mimaki told local media ahead of the memorials.
Pope Leo XIV said in a statement that “in our time of mounting global tensions and conflicts” remained hiroshima and nagasaki “living reminders of the deep horrors performed by nuclear weapons”.
The United Nations Secretary -General Antonio Guterres warned that “weapons themselves brought such destruction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are again treated as forced tools”.
Younger generation
The attacks remain the only time nuclear bombs have been used in wartime.
Kunihiko Sakuma, 80, who survived the blasts as a baby, told AFP that he was hopeful that there could eventually be a nuclear -free world.
“The younger generation works hard for that purpose,” he said prior to the ceremony.
But in January, Bulletin changed for nuclear scientists’ Doomsday Clock “to 89 seconds until midnight, the closest in his 78-year history.
The clock, which symbolized the distance of humanity from destruction, was last moved to 90 seconds to midnight over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Russia and the United States account for about 90 percent of the world’s over 12,000 war heads, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Sipri warned in June that “a dangerous new nuclear weapon race is emerging at a time when weapons control regimes are severely weakened,” with almost all the nine nuclear armed states that modernize their arsenals.
Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump said he had ordered the deployment of two atoms submarines after an online spat with former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
