US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the third-ranking US official after the president and vice president, bowed both before and after laying a bunch of carnations and white lilies at a memorial to the Hiroshima bombing. -- PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
HIROSHIMA - US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laid flowers on Tuesday at a memorial to the Hiroshima atomic bombing, becoming the highest-ranking sitting US official to pay respects at the site.
Mrs Pelosi, a Democrat who is the third-ranking US official after the president and vice president, bowed both before and after laying a bunch of carnations and white lilies on a hot sunny day in the southwestern Japanese city.
She was invited to Hiroshima - which was devastated by a US atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 near the end of World War II - for a meeting of parliament speakers of the Group of Eight major industrial nations.
Schoolchildren waved the flags of Japan, the United States and other G8 nations and sang hymns calling for world peace after Pelosi and other parliament speakers laid flowers in honour of those killed in the bombing.
The speakers then headed to a museum, where an ageing survivor was to talk to them about the misery he went through.
No sitting US president or vice president has visited the memorial in Hiroshima.
More than 140,000 people were killed in the Hiroshima bombing either instantly or in the days and weeks ahead from radiation or horrific burns.
The United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki three days later, killing another 70,000 people. Japan surrendered less than a week later, ending World War II.
The Hiroshima visit was arranged by the speaker of Japan's lower house, Mr Yohei Kono, an outspoken defender of the country's post-World War II pacifism.
The G8 parliament speakers were later to hold closed-door discussions on nuclear disarmament.
Mainstream opinion in Japan almost unanimously considers the atomic bombings to have been immoral, with many arguing that the United States was trying to show its strength against the Soviet Union in anticipation of the Cold War.
Views are much more divided in the United States, where veteran groups passionately argue that the decision to drop the atomic bombs forced Japan into early surrender and saved many lives.
While no sitting US presidents have visited the Hiroshima memorial, Mr Jimmy Carter visited after leaving office and Mr Richard Nixon came as a private citizen between his stints as vice president and president. -- AFP
