A child offers a prayer at a ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Aug. 9. Nagasaki was flattened three days after the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima. About 80,000 people in Nagasaki were killed; about 140,000 were killed in Hiroshima.
NAGASAKI: Atomic bomb
survivors, including peace activist Noboru Tasaki, expressed mixed emotions
about the attendance - or lack thereof - of foreign officials at the 65th
anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on Monday. While British and
French delegates attended, representatives from the United States, which
dropped the atomic bomb, did not.
This was the first time
delegates from nuclear-armed Britain and France attended the ceremony, after
first having received invitations from Nagasaki's city government in 2005. Tasaki
was overcome by the presence of British and French delegates.
"This shows that people in
the two countries who want to see nuclear weapons abolished are becoming a
majority. … Attendees should realize how disastrous the atomic bombing was, and
that nuclear weapons should never be used again. Britain and France, both
nuclear powers, can pressure the United States," he said.
While the U.S. government
sent U.S. Ambassador John Roos to Hiroshima's atomic bomb anniversary last
Friday, no official U.S. delegates were sent to Nagasaki. Last year, Tasaki had
petitioned U.S. President Barack Obama to visit Nagasaki. Expressing anger, Tasaki
asked, "Why hasn't anyone [from the U.S. government] come to Nagasaki?"
Tasaki, a former Nagasaki city
official, has worked for 20 years to promote peace - and he was the first chief
of Nagasaki's Peace Promotion Office. He held the post for seven years until
retiring in March, 2003.
In 1996 with then-Nagasaki
Mayor Itcho Ito, Tasaki traveled to Geneva for a meeting of Mayors for Peace -
and the two also visited resident ambassadors from U.N. nuclear weapons states to
urge disarmament. Despite expressing sympathy for the hardships suffered by victim-survivors
of the atomic blast, all the ambassadors they met held to saying that nuclear
weapons were necessary as a deterrent.
On Monday, Tasaki said he would
never forget Ito's words: "They just don't understand the reality of
atomic bombing. The barrier in understanding is very thick."
Sixty-five
years ago today: Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors
Ceremony attendee Fude Sakaki,
a 93-year-old Nagasaki citizen who also survived the bombing, said that she had
lost many friends to the disaster.
"The attendance of
British and French delegates is an important step. I want the nuclear powers to
exert themselves so that while I'm alive, I can see a world without nuclear
weapons," she said.
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David Rothauser, who has
directed an American documentary about atomic bomb survivors, said that if
Obama had attended the ceremony, there would have been more progress made
toward abolishing nuclear weapons. Rothauser said that the U.S. president, as
leader of the country who had used nuclear weapons in war and who vowed to
abolish them during a speech in Prague, should lead by example.
The number of foreign
government representatives at the Nagasaki ceremony exceeded 30. In 2005, Russia
and Ukraine were the only countries to send delegates.
