DM Monitoring
TOKYO: Japan on Saturday commemorated the 75th anniversary of its surrender in World War II, with Emperor Naruhito expressing his “deep remorse” over Japan’s wartime actions at an annual mourning ceremony in Tokyo.
The emperor and empress, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a limited number of people attended the ceremony which was scaled back due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Naruhito, the country’s first emperor born after the war, expressed “deep remorse” as he did last year, in a rare public appearance amid the pandemic with his wife Empress Masako.
“Looking back on the long period of postwar peace, reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse, I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never again be repeated,” Emperor Naruhito said in his address at the annual memorial service.
As the COVID-19 infections spread across the country, the 60-year-old emperor who ascended the throne in May 2019 has postponed or canceled all of his regular regional tours. The ceremony was held in Nippon Budokan, with around 540 people attending, less than 10 percent of the number in 2019 and the lowest on record since the government started holding the event in 1963, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
Abe, who is eager to revise the postwar pacifist Constitution, did not refer to Japan’s wartime aggression in his address.
Japan brutally occupied many parts of Asia before and during World War II, causing untold suffering and death to hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. There were numerous more heinous incidents carried out by the Japanese army, that until this day, have received far less coverage in educational textbooks, or in globally televised memorial services.
The Saturday’s ceremony was also livestreamed on the government’s YouTube channel for the first time.
A moment of silence was observed at noon for the people who perished in the war, including those killed in the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
