THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
August 15, 2023 at 18:55 JST
Japan commemorated its war dead at a ceremony in Tokyo on the 78th anniversary of the end of World War II as Typhoon No. 7 sharply cut the number of participants.
About 1,800 people attended the government-sponsored ceremony held at the Nippon Budokan hall on Aug. 15, including Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako. About 2,700 were initially expected.
Around 570 bereaved family members from 10 prefectures, including Aichi, Mie and Shiga, canceled their attendance due to Typhoon No. 7, which made landfall in Wakayama Prefecture on the morning of Aug. 15.
The number of participants nearly doubled from last year, when the ceremony was held under novel coronavirus restrictions, but it remained around half the level of pre-pandemic years.
At noon, the participants observed a minute of silent prayer for the approximately 3.1 million Japanese people who died after the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937.
As in his address last year, Kishida did not express “deep remorse” or offer “condolences” over Japan’s wartime aggression in Asian countries.
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe avoided those sentiments in his address in 2013, although his predecessors had included messages of “remorse” and “condolences" in their war anniversary speeches since 1993.
Yoshihide Suga, who succeeded Abe in 2020, also followed in Abe’s steps.
In his address, however, Emperor Naruhito referred to “feelings of deep remorse” as he reflected on Japan’s past and said he earnestly hopes “the ravages of war will never again be repeated.” He has used the same expressions previously.
The bereaved family members are aging. In recent years, only one or two spouses of the war dead attended the ceremony. The parents of the war dead last attended the ceremony in 2010.
Of the 1,501 bereaved family members who were expected to attend the ceremony as of Aug. 13, 648 people, or 43.2 percent, were born after World War II. It was the first time that those born after the war accounted for more than 40 percent of attendees.
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Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako observe a minute of silent prayer at a ceremony remembering the war dead at the Nippon Budokan hall in Tokyo on Aug. 15. (Tatsuya Shimada)
