JAPAN: A Japanese ultra-nationalist who defaced a memorial to Hiroshima's 140,000 atom-bomb victims says he wants the US to apologise for the 1945 attack.
Takeo Shimazu chiselled out the word "mistake" from a granite cenotaph in the city's Peace Memorial Park which reads: "Let all the souls here rest in peace as we will never repeat this mistake" - a reference to the war waged by imperial Japan - before surrendering himself to Hiroshima police.
"America dropped the bomb on us so America should apologise," Mr Shimazu said. "Why is Japan saying sorry on a monument we built? America should have built this memorial, not Japan."
The mayor of Hiroshima denounced the attack as a "desecration" of the souls of atomic bomb victims. "It is a crime of the most malicious kind that violates the hearts of the people in Hiroshima and the rest of the world who wish for world peace."
Many ultra-nationalists despise the memorial. It was dedicated to the bomb's victims in 1952 in a speech by the city's mayor that condemned Japanese militarism and which has since become a global mecca for pacifists and anti-war campaigners.
However they have never seriously attacked it until now.
In March 2002, an unknown assailant splashed the memorial with paint, forcing the city to mount security cameras.
Authorities believe the latest attack is significant because it comes less than two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the bombing on August 6th, 1945, when thousands of people will gather in the park.
"Obviously Mr Shimazu and his group wanted to make a point," Hiroshima City Office said. "They knew that the attack was likely to get more attention now, when the world is looking."
Michiko Yamaoka, who was badly disfigured by the bombing and who is now an anti-nuclear campaigner, said the attack showed Hiroshima was a changed city.
"This would never have happened before. There are a lot of young people now who know nothing about the war or the bombing and they think that Japan has apologied enough."
The attack comes amid a growing revisionist movement in Japan which has tried to play down many of the worst crimes of the country's imperialist rule in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s.
Politicians want to tone down a resolution marking the 60th anniversary of the end of the war by deleting the words "acts of aggression" which appeared in a similar statement in 1995, the Japanese media has reported.
"We . . . deeply regret the suffering that our country's actions in a certain period of the past caused on people from Asian and other countries, and again pay sincere tribute to all of the victims," a draft of the parliamentary resolution was quoted as saying.
The draft omitted the words "acts of aggression" as well as "colonial rule" which were included in a parliamentary resolution adopted in 1995 when then prime minister Tomiichi Murayama - a socialist - was in power.