Japanese Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the US during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war, a news report said yesterday.
"I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped," Kyodo News agency quoted Kyuma as saying in a speech at a university in Chiba, just east of Tokyo.
The US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of World War II, in the world's only nuclear attacks.
Kyuma, who is from Nagasaki, said the bombing caused great suffering in the city, but that he does not resent the US because it prevented the Soviet Union from entering the war with Japan, Kyodo said.
It is rare for Japanese Cabinet ministers to make such remarks.
However, the defense minister said later that his comments had been misinterpreted.
He told reporters he meant to say the bombing "could not be helped from the American point of view."
"It's too bad that my comments were interpreted as approving the US bombing," he said.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the US dropped a bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, killing at least 140,000 people in the world's first atomic bomb attack.
Three days later, it dropped another atomic bomb, "Fat Man," on Nagasaki. City officials say about 74,000 died.
Japan, which had attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945.
Bombing survivors have developed various illnesses from radiation exposure, including cancer and liver diseases.
Kyuma's remarks drew immediate criticism from Japanese atomic bomb victims.
"The US justifies the bombings saying they saved many American lives," said Nobuo Miyake, the 78-year-old director-general of a group of victims living in Tokyo.
"It's outrageous for a Japanese politician to voice such thinking. Japan is a victim," he said.
In the US, the bombings are widely seen as a weapon of last resort against an enemy that was determined to fight to the death but instead surrendered unconditionally, six days after Nagasaki was attacked.
Critics, including many Japanese and also some Americans, believe then US president Harry Truman's government had other motives -- a wish to test a terrifying weapon, the desire to defeat Japan before the Soviet Union arrived and the need to strengthen Washington's hand against Moscow in what would become the Cold War.
Defense ministry officials were not immediately available for comment yesterday.
In January, Kyuma called the US decision to invade Iraq a "mistake" because it was based on the false premise that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Kyuma later said those remarks, too, were misinterpreted. He said he meant to say that he thought at the time that the US needed to be "more cautious."
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