Kishida marks 78th anniversary of World War II’s end

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida renewed a peace pledge Tuesday as Japan observed the 78th anniversary of its World War II defeat but did not mention the country’s wartime aggression in Asia, while three of his former and current Cabinet ministers visited a shrine seen by neighboring countries as a symbol of militarism.
Japan will “stick to our resolve to never repeat the tragedy of the war,” Kishida said at a solemn ceremony in a speech that was almost identical to what he read last year.
The absence of any reference to Japanese aggression across Asia in the first half of the 1900s or its victims in the region followed a precedent set by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2013, in what was seen by critics as a move to whitewash Japan’s wartime brutality.
Kishida stressed the destruction that Japan suffered from the war, including the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fire bombings across Japan and the bloody ground battle on Okinawa, and the suffering of Japanese people.
He said Japan will stick to its postwar peace pledge and will continue to cooperate with the world in solving global issues.