HIROSHIMA, Japan, Aug. 6 - At 8:15 a.m. Saturday, as tens of thousands of Japanese bowed their heads here to mark the instant when an atomic bomb fell 60 years ago, only the loud, telltale buzz of the summer cicadas broke the respectful silence.
People praying n Hiroshima today, the anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, which instantly or soon after killed 140,000.
In an hourlong ceremony at the Peace Memorial Park, participants, as in previous years, laid wreathes, burned incense, prayed for the souls of the dead, and gave impassioned pleas for world peace and the abolition of nuclear arms. Few in Hiroshima can remember an Aug. 6 that was not oppressively hot, and Saturday morning's blazing sun matched expectation and memory.
Still, on the 60th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack, some members of the aging and dwindling population of survivors expressed worries that Japan was shedding its postwar pacifism. The survivors, whose suffering had long made them Japan's most eloquent advocates for pacifism, said recent policy changes inside Japan had made them deeply pessimistic.
"The dispatch of our Self-Defense Forces to Iraq is completely out of line with pacifism," said Akihiro Takahashi, an A-bomb survivor and former director of the Peace Memorial Museum here. "In the future, the peace constitution will no doubt be revised, and that will lead to conscription and, eventually, the possession of nuclear arms."
Since early 2004 Japan has had about 500 troops in southern Iraq, deployed on a humanitarian aid, noncombat mission.
A decade ago, on the last major anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, the possibility of Japan acquiring nuclear arms or revising its war-renouncing was unthinkable. Today, North Korea's possible possession of nuclear weapons has led many here to worry about a regional arms race, and Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has begun the process of revising the American-imposed postwar constitution.
"Things have changed," said Dr. Hiroshi Maruya, 80, a physician and survivor of the nuclear blast.
"Ten years ago, few could question Article 9 of the constitution," he said of the war-renouncing clause. "But people talk about it openly now."
With government thinking no longer matching the survivors' message of pacifism, the general attitude toward them has changed, survivors and experts say.
Osamu Fujiwara, associate professor of peace studies at Tokyo Keizai University, said Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi did not follow his predecessors' practice of speaking to A-bomb survivors after the annual Aug. 6 ceremony.
"There is no political debate over this cancellation," Professor Fujiwara said. "The ceremony itself has become history, and the A-bomb itself has become a thing of the past."
Dr. Maruya described the government's attitude toward the survivors as "very cold."
"It's as if the government is saying, 'It is no use listening to you,' " he said. "Power politics is the theory of the new world."
In keeping with his city's idealistic pacifism, Hiroshima's mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba, has proposed working through the United Nations to eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide by 2020. But an editorial in Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper, reflected the new prevailing mood toward this kind of pacifism by bluntly calling it "empty." The editorial added that the antinuclear campaign "should reflect reality."
Making the same kind of universal appeal for pacifism that the nation's leaders used to make, Mayor Akiba said of the anniversary on Saturday, "It is also a time of inheritance, of awakening, and of commitment, in which we inherit the commitment of the A-bomb survivors to the abolition of nuclear weapons and realization of genuine world peace, awaken to our individual responsibilities, and recommit ourselves to take action."
To that end, a couple of hours after the ceremony, Miyoko Watanabe, 75, told the story she had told countless times. Exactly 60 years ago she walked out of her house when the strong sun made her return for a parasol. At 8:15 a.m., as she stepped out of her house again, she saw a flash of light in the distance. As the fire blew toward her, she crouched to protect herself, according to the drills that she had been taught at school. The bomb left her relatively unharmed, but it seriously injured her mother and killed her father.