Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida plans to release a declaration on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation at the Group of Seven foreign ministers' meeting in Hiroshima in April, foreign ministry sources said Thursday.
Kishida has said Japan wants to send a strong message calling for a world without nuclear weapons as the host of the G-7 meeting and the only country to have undergone a nuclear attack. Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered U.S. atomic bombings in 1945.
The meeting of G-7 foreign ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States will be held April 10-11 in the city ahead of their leaders' meeting in Mie Prefecture in May.
The declaration will highlight the importance of maintaining transparency on nuclear arsenals, including disclosing the number of nuclear warheads each country possesses. China has not disclosed how many nuclear warheads it has, the sources said.
The document will also call for shared recognition of the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons and note the significance of the visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki by world political leaders, they said.
The paper will also seek multilateral coordination in responding to the threat of North Korea's nuclear and missile development, the sources said.
Kishida aims to finalize the declaration with his G-7 peers through diplomatic channels, although the United States, Britain and France — all nuclear powers — may hold different views to those of the nonnuclear nations over disarmament and nonproliferation, the sources said.