Japan's defence minister resigned today over his comments suggesting the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inevitable.
Fumio Kyuma had come under severe criticism from atomic bomb survivors, opposition politicians and fellow members of the Cabinet following the comments over the weekend.
Fumio Kyuma, Japan's defence minister resigned today over his comments suggesting the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inevitable.
Mr Kyuma ignited a political furore less than a month before parliamentary elections when he said on Saturday that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and his native Nagasaki were an inevitable way of ending the Second World War.
The statement contradicted the Japanese stance, fiercely guarded by survivors and their supporters, that the use of nuclear weapons is never justified. A ban on possession of such weapons is a pillar of Japan's postwar pacifist regime.
Earlier today, Nagasaki's mayor made an official protest in Tokyo. "That comment tramples on the feelings of the A-bomb victims, and as a target of the bomb, Nagasaki certainly cannot let this go by," Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue wrote in a letter handed over to Mr Kyuma this morning.
"I truly apologise for having troubled and caused worry to the people of Nagasaki," Mr Kyuma said.
The bomb comment has hit Mr Abe's increasingly unpopular government at a sensitive time, coming just a few weeks before July 29th elections for the upper house of parliament.
Kyuma - who represents Nagasaki in the lower house - said the US atomic bombings caused great suffering in the city but that otherwise Japan would have kept fighting and ended up losing a greater part of its northern territory to the Soviet Union, which invaded Manchuria on the day Nagasaki was bombed.