Japan to organise meeting between Hiroshima survivors and G-7 leaders including US

The Japanese government is planning to arrange a meeting with the leaders of the Group of Seven or G-7 and the Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors. According to The Japan Times, the Kishida administration is planning to conduct this meeting in May when the Asian country will host the G-7 summit. On Saturday, a source close to the Japanese government revealed that the meeting will be part of Japanese PM Fumio Kishida’s effort to lead the world towards a nuclear weapons-free future. The information becomes haunting since on Saturday, the Japanese Prime Minister survived an attack after a man threw a cylindrical object which exploded ahead of Kishida’s campaign speech. 

The source told the Japanese news outlet that arrangements are being made to organise the meeting with the atomic bomb survivors who are popularly known as hibakusha. According to The Japan Times, the meeting is expected to take place on May 19, when the leaders will pay a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. This will mark the first joint visit to the museum by the G7 countries which include the nuclear-powered nations of Britain, France and the United States. The Japanese PM, who is actually the representative of a constituency in Hiroshima, is hoping to use the summit to pitch his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. 

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki mayors spearheaded the meeting

According to The Japan Times, in February,  Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui and Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue asked the Japanese PM to arrange a visit by the G7 leaders to the decorated museum. In the year 2016, Barrack Obama became the first sitting US President to set foot in Hiroshima, the Japanese city where the American forces dropped an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. During the 2016 visit, then US President Obama held talks with Sunao Tsuboi, who was a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor and a chairperson of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. The heroic survivor passed away in 2021 at the age of 96.