National News

Mayor advocates reconciliation not retaliation at Hiroshima anniversary

During the 57th anniversary of the first atomic bombing Aug. 6, the mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba, strongly criticized what he described as the unilateral approach of U.S. President George W. Bush's administration in international affairs. "The United States government has no right to force Pax Americana on the rest of us, or unilaterally determine the fate of the world," Akiba said in the city's annual peace declaration, attended by around 45,000 people, at Peace Memorial Park in Naka Ward.

"The probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing," especially in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., to which the Bush administration responded with its war on terrorism.

"The path of reconciliation, severing the chain of hatred, violence and retaliation, so long advocated by the survivors (of the 1945 atomic bombing), has been abandoned," Akiba said.

Akiba urged Bush to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki to "confirm with his own eyes what nuclear weapons hold in store for us all."

Akiba also demanded that the Japanese government preserve its war-renouncing Constitution and not make Japan "a 'normal country' capable of making war like all other nations."

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who also attended the ceremony, said in his speech that there will be no change in Japan's three principles of not producing, not possessing and not allowing nuclear arms on its soil.

Koizumi said that Tokyo will continue its efforts to call on other countries to join the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and have the pact enforced in the near future.

Shukan ST: Aug. 16, 2002

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