A silent prayer was held in Japan on Wednesday morning as it marked 80 years since the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba attended the ceremony, along with officials from around the world and the city's mayor Kazumi Matsui.
In a speech, mayor Matsui said that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, was "on the brink of dysfunctionality". He also called on the Japanese government to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—an international agreement banning nuclear weapons that came into force in 2021.
On the streets leading up to the Peace Memorial Park, there were small protests calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Satoshi Tanaka, another atomic bomb survivor who suffered multiple cancers from radiation exposure, said that seeing the bloodshed in Gaza and Ukraine today conjures up his own suffering.
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