VJ Day 2025: Japan's PM expresses remorse over Second World War
Speaking at an annual government ceremony for the war dead at the Nippon Budokan arena in Tokyo, Shigeru Ishiba said Japan would remain committed to peace.
'We should never repeat the devastation of war. We will never ever make a mistake in choosing the path to take,' Ishiba said. 'The remorse and lessons from that war should once again be engraved deeply in our hearts.'
It was the first time since 2012 that a Japanese premier used the word at the ceremony, which is held to mourn the 3.1 million casualties of war in Japan.
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A moment of silence was observed at noon, exactly 80 years after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration in a radio broadcast.
The four-and-a-half-minute address, delivered a few days after the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and replayed from a scratchy phonograph recording, stunned the nation in 1945, when Hirohito said that 'the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage'.
The word 'surrender' was not used. Even today, August 15 is referred to as 'the day of the end of the war' in Japan.
At the ceremony on Friday, Hirohito's grandson, Emperor Naruhito, also expressed 'deep remorse' and said the nation should never repeat the calamity of war.
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However, other politicians paid their respects across the road at Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial to Japan's fallen soldiers, including officers who were judged class-A war criminals. The museum at the shrine presents a defiant narrative of the war and Japan's Asian neighbours view Yasukuni as a symbol of militarism.
Shinjiro Koizumi, the agriculture minister, offered his prayers at the sanctuary, along with thousands of visitors. 'It is important not to forget our pledge never to fight a war again and gratitude for those who lost their lives for the nation,' he said.
The former ministers Takayuki Kobayashi and Sanae Takaichi also visited Yasukuni on Friday, according to Japanese media, along with 52 members of a bipartisan parliamentary group. Ishiba sent a ritual offering but did not visit.
China's embassy in Japan said the commemorations at the shine reflected Japan's 'wrong' attitude towards its history of aggression and the 'lingering ghosts' of its militarism. South Korea's government also expressed 'deep disappointment and regret' over the visit.
Yasukuni Shrine added 14 wartime leaders, including Tojo Hideki, the prime minister who was hanged in 1948, to its lists of enshrined war dead in 1978. The move apparently incensed Hirohito, who did not visit the shrine after that. His son and grandson have also stayed away from it.
Koizumi's father, Junichiro Koizumi, was the last prime minister to offer prayers at Yasukuni on August 15 when he visited in 2006. No sitting Japanese prime minister has visited the shrine since Shinzo Abe in 2013.
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