JAPAN: 60 years on, bomb survivors worry about Japan's increasing nuclear capability, writes David McNeill in Hiroshima
Tsunao Tsuboi is among an estimated 60,000 people in Hiroshima this weekend to commemorate the victims of the atomic bomb that incinerated the city exactly 60 years ago today.
Tsuboi was 20 when Little Boy detonated over the "City of Water" in a piercing blue sky at 8.15am on August 6th, 1945, causing a searing fireball that left him burned so badly he was lucky to survive.
Thousands of people were instantly carbonised in a blast that was thousands of times hotter than the sun's surface; farther from the epicentre, birds ignited in mid-flight, eyeballs popped and internal organs were sucked from bodies of victims.
High above, the crew of the Enola Gay watched in awe as their payload detonated.
"As the bomb exploded, we saw the entire city disappear," said Commander Robert Lewis. "I wrote in my log, 'My God, what have we done?'"
Nearly half of Hiroshima's wartime population of 310,000 was killed in the blast and its aftermath. Today another five thousand or so names will be added to the official list of victims, which currently stands at 230,000. Three days later 70,000 more were killed when Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki.
"Every year I come to pray that nobody else will have to experience what we did," said Mr Tsuboi, who like many survivors has battled recurring bouts of cancer. "I pray that the world will abandon these weapons for ever."
The commemoration ceremony - expected to be the largest in years - will be swelled by thousands of anti-nuclear campaigners from across the planet, and is likely to be dominated by concerns that the world is forgetting the bitter lessons learned here.
For several years the city's mayor has criticised - without naming the country - attempts by "the world's superpower" to "ignore international law" and "turn its back on the wishes of humanity".
Hiroshima's A-bomb survivors, or hibakusha, are dismayed by America's plans to develop "tactical" nuclear weapons about half the size of Little Boy, and by the failure of the global non-proliferation treaty conference in May.
Most are closely following the six-party talks in Beijing, where negotiators are struggling to defuse the threat from another potential member of the growing nuclear club, North Korea.
But the hibakusha have also been shocked by indifference, and worse, closer to home. Many have spent years speaking in front of increasingly bored, uninterested schoolchildren around Japan. Annual visits to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, a secular pilgrimage for pacifists everywhere, have fallen by half a million in the past 10 years.
Last week a young ultra-nationalist took a hammer and chisel to the once-sacred monument to the bomb's victims, another unwelcome sign for locals that Japan and the world are changing for the worse.
"I have never been more afraid about the future than I am now," said Michiko Yamaoka. "I don't trust the politicians in Tokyo to safeguard our anti-nuclear stance. They should all come here and experience what we did."
Six decades after the Little Boy blast that disfigured Ms Yamaoka for life, Japan has amassed 45 tons of plutonium and is getting set to open one of the world's largest nuclear reprocessing plants, a move antinuclear campaigners say dishonours the victims of August 6th.
"Japan is increasing the nuclear threat by accumulating unnecessary plutonium and opening this plant, which will be the largest producer of plutonium in the world," said Atsuko Nogawa of Greenpeace Japan. "Japan is about to become a country with a nuclear capability on a much bigger scale."
Although Japan tried to build a rudimentary A-bomb during the second World War, the bitter legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has meant that any talk of developing nuclear weapons has been political suicide for years. Official policy is that Japan will not "manufacture or possess nuclear weapons or allow their introduction into" the country.
But the reality has not always matched the rhetoric. Nuclear-armed US vessels have been allowed to dock in Japanese ports. In the 1970s the prime minister, Eisaku Sato, secretly commissioned a report on the nuclear option, which caused a furore when it was leaked 20 years later.
Politicians have more recently become bolder in challenging the nuclear taboo. A senior opposition figure, Ichiro Ozawa, said in 2002: "We have plenty of plutonium in our nuclear power plants, so it's possible for us to produce 3,000 to 4,000 nuclear warheads."
The same year the chief cabinet secretary, Yasuo Fukuda, stunned the nation by claiming Japan's "pacifist" constitution did not prohibit nuclear weapons.
All this may or may not be a prelude to the survivors' greatest fear, a nuclear-armed Japan. Either way the hibakusha, whose average age is now 72, know their time is limited to show the world the end result of such plans; for many, this will be their last ceremony.