August 6

Until I read Eric Johnston's excellent exposition of the US campaign to get Japan to adopt nuclear energy, I never understood why US writers would deluge Japanese media with letters disparaging the annual memorial services for those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Even so, the services continue. This year, for the first time, there is a guest from a major nuclear power.

The Japan Times reports as follows:

The Russian ambassador to Japan, in Hiroshima for a ceremony to remember the annihilation of the city in 1945, pledged Friday to make sure nuclear calamities like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the Fukushima No. 1 power plant accident never happen again.

"The nuclear crisis is a disaster by natural causes and Hiroshima is a disaster caused by humans. But there is something in common between them: We must make efforts to make sure a similar thing will never happen again," Mikhail Bely, 65, told reporters a day before the 66th anniversary of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing.

The ambassador from one of the nuclear weapon states is set to attend the peace memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima on Saturday, and in Nagasaki on Tuesday, for the first time. Bely became ambassador to Japan in 2007.

"Japan has memories of the (A-bomb) disaster . . . and their efforts to pass on such memories will be a big contribution to the movement to nuclear arms reductions," Bely said after visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.