MOSCOW, August 12. /TASS/. Attempts by Japan to distort history and hush up the role the United States played in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are puzzling, Farit Mukhametshin, deputy chair of the Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs, said on Friday.
"The tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not in the past, and I am afraid its consequences would be felt by the Japanese people for decades to come. Against this background, Tokyo’s attempts to politicize the topic and its ambitions to distort the true course of history look puzzling. To our surprise, the Japanese government has been hushing up the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the Russian senator said at a roundtable.
In their speeches, Japanese officials never mention the country that "committed these ferocities," and when working on multilateral documents on nuclear disarmament issues, Japan has been avoiding any reference to the United States as the country responsible for the bombings, Mukhametshin noted.
This year, Tokyo refused to invite the Russian ambassador to the annual peace memorial ceremony commemorating the tragic events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while it has traditionally invited the US envoy since 2010, despite the fact that Washington never apologized to the Japanese people for the inhumane bombings, the Russian senator said.
"The US atomic bombings of the peaceful Japanese cities had no military significance, but they carried a clear political message - to signal its military superiority to the Soviet Union," he said.
Mukhametshin added with regret that increasingly more Japanese nationals, mostly youths, tend to believe Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed by the Soviet Union. "Today, we can see this anti-Russian campaign reaching its climax. Local governments under pressure from central ones have been attempting to link the atomic bombings of the two Japanese cities to the special military operation in Ukraine," the Russian senator concluded.