Hiroshima - Saba:
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba avoided mentioning the United States as the country responsible for dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, during a commemoration of the incident in Hiroshima on Wednesday.
"Eighty years ago, on this day, an atomic bomb exploded, and it is believed that it killed more than 100,000 dear people," Shigeru Ishiba said during the commemoration ceremony, without mentioning the United States as the country responsible for the bombing. In August 1945, during World War II, American pilots dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Hiroshima explosion killed up to 140,000 of the city's 350,000 residents on August 6 of that year, while Nagasaki lost approximately 74,000 lives on August 9.
Kazumi Matsui, the mayor of Hiroshima, mentioned the United States only in the context of it being a nuclear-weapon state.
In his speech marking the 80th anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima, UN Secretary-General António Guterres did not identify the responsible state.
Izumi Nakamitsu, the UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, delivered the speech in Japanese and referred only to the "loss of tens of thousands of lives" in the Hiroshima tragedy. More than 120 representatives of foreign countries, as well as Japanese politicians, participated in the ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing, held in Hiroshima on Wednesday.
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