Hiroshima on Sunday marked the 72nd anniversary of its atomic bombing by the U.S., with Mayor Kazumi Matsui using the annual memorial ceremony to call on the central government to help make a treaty banning nuclear weapons a reality.
This year's ceremony at Peace Memorial Park near ground zero follows the adoption by 122 U.N. members last month of the world's first treaty to comprehensively ban nuclear weapons.
The treaty's preamble uses the term hibakusha in mentioning "the unacceptable suffering" experienced by the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings, which had killed an estimated 214,000 people by the end of 1945.