The day the bomb dropped: Nagasaki remembers

TOKYO－The Japanese city of Nagasaki on Sunday marked its 75th anniversary of the US atomic bombing, with the mayor and the dwindling band of survivors urging world leaders including their own to do more for a nuclear weapons ban.

The ceremony was held at the Peace Park and the number of participants was roughly one-tenth the usual number to avoid crowding as COVID-19 continues to spread across the country. About 500 people and representatives of about 70 some countries and regions attended the annual memorial ceremony. To prevent further infections, there were no seats for the public.

At 11:02 am, a moment's silence was observed by those attending the ceremony, the time when a US B-29 bomber dropped a plutonium-core atomic bomb, nicknamed Fat Man, on Aug 9, 1945, killing about 74,000 people in Nagasaki by the end of that year.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki followed one dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier, both bombings a means of accelerating the end of World War II and forcing Japan to surrender without a land invasion that would have claimed many more lives, according to experts.

Tomihisa Taue, the city mayor, urged the central government to immediately sign a UN treaty banning nuclear weapons at the ceremony. "If, as with the novel coronavirus, which we did not fear until it began spreading among our immediate surroundings, humanity does not become aware of the threat of nuclear weapons until they are used again, we will find ourselves in an irrevocable predicament."

'Must never be repeated'

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for his part, avoided mentioning the UN treaty, saying the horror of nuclear devastation experienced by Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the human suffering that resulted from it must never be repeated.

A message from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was conveyed in the ceremony. "The international community must return to the understanding that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought," he said.

"We must continue to uphold the norm against nuclear testing. And we must protect and further strengthen the international nuclear disarmament regime."

While Japan inwardly looks at the tragedies it experienced at the end of World War II, historians and others have encouraged Japan to come to see itself not as merely a victim of the atomic bombings also as a perpetrator that paved the way to them to these tragic incidents.

Xinhua