MOSCOW, August 12. /TASS/. Russia’s Ambassador to Japan Mikhail Galuzin on Friday said Japan’s ruling class is seeking to erase from the country’s historical memory that the US was responsible for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He made the comments by video link during a roundtable discussion in the Russian parliament that was dedicated to an anniversary of the bombings.
"It seems that the Japanese leadership is diligently adjusting its official assessments in connection with the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to its priorities, which are primarily related to the desire to cement as strongly as possible the military-political alliance with Washington, where Tokyo is obviously in the position of a wingman. This alliance is positioned by successive governments of Japan as the core and, in fact, the only possible foundation for ensuring the national security of the country," he said.
"China, Russia and the DPRK are considered as challenges and threats to Japan's security in a demonstrative, speculative manner. Accordingly, if we talk about the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this context, the ruling class of Japan primarily seeks to erase from historical memory the American authorship of the barbaric murder of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians in these cities," the diplomat went on to say.
Galuzin said the policy boils down to "minimizing references to the United States as the country that planned and carried out these inhumane bombings." According to him, "all this was fully manifested at the recent ceremonies on the occasion of the 77th anniversary of the atomic tragedy." For example, he observed that the rhetoric of both Japanese officials and the so-called big media "lacked any hint of the need for an apology from the United States for its criminal barbaric act of 1945."
The ambassador also noted that the distinctive feature of the ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki this year "was a very demonstrative, cynical and speculative exploitation of groundless attacks against Russia as allegedly almost the main source of the threat of using nuclear weapons."
Director of the Third Department of Asia at the Russian Foreign Ministry Nikolay Nozdrev during the roundtable discussion criticized as outrageous the refusal by the Japanese authorities to allow the Russian ambassador to participate in commemorative events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He said the Japanese establishment not only violated the generally accepted norms of diplomatic protocol and human ethics, and that Russia sees, including from the conditions in which the Russian Embassy in Japan currently operates, and on the humanitarian trek, how the Japanese leadership is ready to cynically use the most tragic pages of its own country’s history for opportunistic political purposes.
"We regard it as absolutely outrageous that the organizers of the traditional memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki refused to invite the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Japan Mikhail Yurievich Galuzin," he said.
The diplomat said that since the tradition was established in the 1970s that heads of foreign diplomatic missions take part in these events, the Russian diplomatic mission never missed them.