Nagasaki marked the 56th anniversary of its atomic bombing yesterday with a speech by the city's mayor criticising the US withdrawal from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-ban Treaty.
About 5,000 people, including the Prime Minister, Mr Junichiro Koizumi, gathered at the Nagasaki Peace Park to hear the Mayor, Mr Itcho Itoh, say the city was "vigorously opposed" to hints "a superpower" was about to renege on international disarmament commitments.
Although not mentioning the US by name, Mr Itoh said he was "very concerned" about the threatened expansion of nuclear weapons into space and urged Tokyo to take the international lead in promoting the abolition of nuclear weapons.
In driving rain a peace bell was rung at 11.02 a.m., marking the exact time a US aircraft dropped a single plutonium bomb on August 9th, 1945, devastating the historical southern port city, which .effectively brought an end to the second World War.
The names of almost 2,500 hibakusha, or survivors of the blast, who died from its effects in the last year were added to the list of over 125,000 victims.
A press conference given after the ceremony by Mr Koizumi was once again dominated by questions about his proposed visit to Yasukuni Shrine next Wednesday on the anniversary of Japan's second World War defeat.
Mr Koizumi repeated that he was "carefully considering" the visit and would make his final decision after meeting senior figures from the three parties in Japan's coalition government.
The visit to the Shinto memorial in the centre of Tokyo, which honours executed war criminals along with about 2.5 million war dead, has generated fierce controversy because of its association with Japan's militarist past.
The Chinese and South Korean governments have warned Mr Koizumi he will do permanent damage to Tokyo's already strained relations with its Asian neighbours if he does not reconsider. Although 106 lawmakers from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, including the Finance Minister, Mr Masajuro Shiokawa, publicly gave their backing to the visit yesterday and are pushing Mr Koizumi to go, the party's coalition partner, the Buddhist-backed New Komeito Party, is known to be opposed, as are other senior members of his cabinet.
Television and newspaper surveys show the Japanese public almost evenly split over the visit, making any decision the prime minister makes politically damaging. If he cancels, his carefully cultivated image as a tough and uncompromising maverick in a party of grey men will be irrevocably tarnished. If he goes ahead, he will earn the wrath of Japan's sizeable anti-war and pacifist lobby.