KYODO NEWS - Aug 1, 2019 - 17:09 | All, Japan

Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui said Thursday he will step up pressure on the Japanese government to join a U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons at a ceremony next week in the city to mark the 74th anniversary of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing.

Matsui told a press conference that he will ask the central government to "accept A-bomb victims' calls for Japan's signing and ratification of the treaty" in the city's peace declaration at the ceremony on Tuesday. The mayor has stopped short of explicitly urging Tokyo to join the 2017 treaty for the past two years.

Tomihisa Taue, mayor of the other A-bombed city Nagasaki, has said he will urge the central government to support the treaty at a ceremony next week to mark the Aug. 9 anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the city, as he has done the past two years.

Some A-bomb survivor groups had strongly requested Matsui to use specific words such as "signing" and "ratification" in pressing the central government to back the treaty, which was adopted in July 2017 by 122 U.N. members.

Japan has refused to participate in the treaty, along with the world's nuclear weapon states and other countries under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

In the previous peace declarations, Matsui urged Tokyo to "bridge the gap between the nuclear weapon and non-nuclear weapon states, thereby facilitating the ratification" of the treaty and to lead the international community toward "dialogue and cooperation for a world without nuclear weapons."

The Hiroshima mayor also said he will cite, for the first time, Japanese classical "tanka" poems, which consist of 31 syllables in a pattern of 5-7-5-7-7, read by atomic bomb survivors to convey the reality of the bombing in their own words.

This year's Hiroshima peace declaration will also refer to remarks by Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India's nonviolent independence movement against British rule, to highlight the importance of tolerance, Matsui said.

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