TOKYO: Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui said on Saturday that it is impossible “to build your own happiness on someone else’s misfortune,“ quoting prominent Russian writer Leo Tolstoy at the Peace Memorial Ceremony, which marks the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
This is the first time UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended the Hiroshima peace memorial ceremony, held annually on Aug 6, when a US jet dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on the city, killing 140,000 people and levelling Hiroshima in 1945.
Matsui asked “to think again about the words of the writer Leo Tolstoy: ‘You cannot build your own happiness on someone else’s misfortune, your happiness lies in the happiness of others.’”
According to the mayor, there is a growing global belief that peace cannot be maintained without a nuclear deterrent, but in order to protect the lives and property of people, it is necessary to create such conditions under which there would be no other solution than the renunciation of nuclear weapons, Sputnik reported.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at the ceremony that the tragedy of Hiroshima must never be repeated.
Guterres, in his speech during the ceremony, called nuclear weapons “nonsense,“ adding that “humanity is playing with a loaded gun”.
“Nuclear weapons are nonsense. Three-quarters of a century later, we must ask what we have learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city in 1945,“ Guterres said. “Humanity is playing with a loaded gun.”
The Peace Memorial Ceremony is held in Hiroshima every year in the Peace Memorial Park, which in 1945 became a mass grave for hundreds of the city’s residents. At the beginning of the ceremony, members of the government, city leaders and representatives of diplomatic missions lay wreaths at the monument in memory of the victims, and a minute of silence is announced at 08:15 (23:15 GMT the previous day), the moment when the atomic explosion broke out over Hiroshima.
In August 1945, US pilots dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, 140,000 people died as a result of the atomic explosion and its consequences, and 74,000 in Nagasaki. The vast majority of the victims of the atomic bombing were civilians.-Bernama
