A ceremony marking the US atomic bombing that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945 has been overshadowed by a row over the city’s decision to not invite Israel.
Representatives from 100 countries attended the ceremony on Friday in Nagasaki Peace Park, but the US and British ambassadors to Japan stayed away in protest at the snub.
Ambassadors from Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the European Union also declined to attend. Russia has not been invited to the ceremony since its invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki denied the Israel snub was political but in June he called for an “immediate” ceasefire in Gaza and he has been under pressure from hibakusha, or survivors of the nuclear attack, to send a message to the Israeli government.
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Some hibakusha said inviting Israel while excluding Russia made it look like Nagasaki supported the Gaza war.
“Our view is that we don’t want to invite a country that engages in war and alludes to the potential threat of using nuclear weapons,” Shigemitsu Tanaka, president of Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Another survivor, Seiichiro Mise, alluded to the Gaza conflict in his speech condemning the “foolishness of war ... As we look at the international situation, we see wars such as those in Ukraine and Palestine dragging on rather than ending, and many children are losing their lives.”
Israel’s ambassador to Japan, Gilad Cohen, wrote on X that the snub “sends a wrong message to the world ... Israel is exercising its full right and moral obligation to defend itself and its citizens and will continue to do so”.
“There is no comparison between Israel, which is being brutally attacked by terrorist organisations, and any other conflict; any attempt to present it otherwise distorts reality.”
Mayor Suzuki used the event to demand that the Japanese government sign a landmark UN treaty banning nuclear weapons.
Japan, which shelters under the US nuclear umbrella, has refused to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first legally binding agreement to ban such weapons since it was adopted in 2017.
The US atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945, killed 70,000 people. The first nuclear bomb, used on Hiroshima three days earlier, killed 140,000 people. Tens of thousands more have since died of radiation-related illnesses.
In his speech, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida said the world should “make Nagasaki the last place to suffer an atomic bombing”.
Later in the day Mr Kishida cancelled a visit to central Asia after the Japan Meteorological Agency issued its first-ever advisory of a possible mega-earthquake.
The agency has told millions of people living along the Pacific coast to take precautions against the earthquake, which follows a powerful quake this week in the southern island of Kyushu.
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