Chinese state media said that the “atomic bombings of Japan were of its own making” ahead of a historic visit to Hiroshima yesterday by US President Barack Obama.
The trip was the first visit to the city by a sitting US President since the bombing, which claimed the lives of 140,000 people.
The state-run China Daily said in an editorial on Thursday that the bombings were of Japan’s “own making” and accused present-day Japanese officials of “trying to portray Japan as the victim of World War II rather than one of its major perpetrators.”
While some in Japan say the attack was an abomination because it targeted civilians, many US and former allied countries say it hastened the end of a brutal and bloody conflict.
The Chinese Communist Party often reminds its citizens of the brutal behavior of Japanese soldiers who occupied China during World War II and accuses Tokyo of attempting to whitewash history.
The bombing of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified, the China Daily said, as “a bid to bring an early end to the war and prevent protracted warfare from claiming even more lives.”
“It was the war of aggression the Japanese militarist government launched against its neighbors and its refusal to accept its failure that had led to US dropping the atomic bombs,” it added.
Obama’s visit came on the sidelines of a meeting of the G7 in Japan.
Elsewhere, North Korea ridiculed Obama’s visit as the “childish” diplomatic ploy of a “nuclear war fanatic.”
In a commentary released late on Thursday, the North’s official KCNA news agency said Obama’s decision to visit the site of the 1945 atomic bomb strike was an act of stunning hypocrisy.
“It is a childish political calculation,” the agency said.
“Even if Obama visits the damaged city, he cannot hide his identity as a nuclear war fanatic and nuclear weapons proliferator,” it added.
Heavily sanctioned over four nuclear tests, Pyongyang insists its own nuclear weapons program is an unavoidable response to decades of US nuclear hostility.
Obama laid a wreath in Hiroshima yesterday at a memorial to the bombing.
The KCNA commentary also questioned Tokyo’s motives in organizing Obama’s visit, saying it was playing up the notion of Japan as a victim of war.
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