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Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is planning to meet next month with members of Nihon Hidankyo, Japan's leading group of atomic bomb survivors that received this year's Nobel Peace Prize, a source familiar with the matter said Thursday. The government is expected to celebrate the group's achievements over its decades of activism and encourage it further ahead of the 80th anniversary of the U.S.
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki next year, during the meeting slated for Jan. 8. Tetsuo Saito, who leads the Komeito party, the junior coalition partner of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, will also attend, according to the source.
Nihon Hidankyo, also known as the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, received the award "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again," according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. During a lower house Budget Committee meeting on Dec 11, Ishiba expressed his intentions to meet with the group, noting that the U.S.
atomic bombings in 1945 "should never fade away." Terumi Tanaka, co-chair of the organization, said during a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, "I plan on asking him why Japan, as the only country to have experienced a nuclear attack, is not taking leadership in nuclear abolition, and whether he's ever imagined what it would be like if a nuclear weapon is used in war." Hidankyo has been calling for Japan to join the nuclear ban treaty, which entered into force in 2021, or at least participate as an observer.
But the country, which is protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, has refused to do so on the grounds that no nuclear state is a party to it.
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