News

by Taiki Yomura, Staff Writer

Some people have rejected the claim that Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga skipped parts of his speech at the Peace Memorial Ceremony held in Hiroshima City on August 6 because certain pages could not be turned due to glue adhering to unexpected places on the speech manuscript. The members of the public deny there were any traces of glue adhered anywhere unexpected in the document. Demanding that the Hiroshima City government disclose information on the matter, the citizens said they have had a chance to look at and confirm the condition of the speech manuscript.

Hirotoshi Honda, 73, a resident of Hatsukaichi City who is former director of the Hiroshima Municipal Archives and a former professor at Ehime University, and Tetsuo Kaneko, 73, a resident of Hiroshima’s Naka Ward and a representative committee member of the Hiroshima Congress Against A- and H-Bombs, among other people, have voiced doubts about the claim made by officials of the Suga government. They were able to confirm the condition of the original manuscript at the Hiroshima Municipal Archives on September 22.

The manuscript read by Mr. Suga at the peace ceremony was composed of seven pieces of paper folded into quarters in a bellows shape and joined by a strip of paper two centimeters in width pasted on the back of the manuscript’s spine. During his speech, Mr. Suga ended up skipping two pages in the middle part of the manuscript. After the ceremony, government officials explained that the pages could not be turned because the glue used to join the pages had adhered to unexpected places on the speech’s paper.

According to Mr. Honda and others, there were no traces of glue on places other than the joined part of the manuscript, and there were no traces of glue that had adhered and later come off, including the parts of the manuscript that had been skipped.

Mr. Kaneko said, “I repeatedly examined the manuscript with great care, but there were no traces of glue inadvertently adhered to other places.” Mr. Honda said, “Mr. Suga skipped important parts in the speech. I wouldn’t be able to accept it if he were to try to shift the blame for his mistake onto government officials.”

The Hiroshima City government indicated that the manuscript had been left on the podium after being read by Mr. Suga. The city government collected the manuscript with other articles after the ceremony, placed the speech in a box, and archived it at the Hiroshima City Hall. The city government reported that the manuscript pages could be turned when a city employee attempted to confirm the condition of the manuscript several days after the ceremony.

The national government’s Cabinet Public Relations Office responded, “We only learned from news reports that glue had adhered to the manuscript. We don’t know whether or not that’s true.”

Left out of Mr. Suga’s speech were parts referring to the inhumanity of nuclear weapons and Japan’s efforts to realize a world without nuclear weapons. Mr. Suga acknowledged that he had skipped parts of his speech and offered his apologies at the start of the news conference held slightly more than two hours after the ceremony.

(Originally published on October 2, 2021)