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The bombing was followed up by a strike three days later on another southern city, Nagasaki.

The visits by the Japanese ministers to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war dead, including 14 Class A criminals convicted by the Allies in trials that followed World War II, came a day after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe issued a much-anticipated speech marking the...

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, when Japanese Emperor Hirohito surrendered to the allied forces. A two paragraph story told of the sinking of the US naval cruiser Indianapolis by the Japanese, shortly before their surrender.

On Saturday, Abe sent a ritual cash offering to Yasukuni Shrine for war dead but did not visit the shrine, seen in China and South Korea as a symbol of Tokyo’s wartime militarism.

“It is true that the prime minister’s statement made (yesterday) left much to be desired”, Park said in a speech marking the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II that ended its 1910-45 colonisation of the Korean Peninsula.

But the prime minister also said that Japan must not let its future generations “be predestined to apologize”.

Abe, the grandson of a wartime cabinet minister, himself did not visit the shrine, which honours 14 Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal, along with millions of war dead.

Queen Elizabeth II led ceremonies in Britain on Saturday marking the 70th anniversary of the victory over Japan during World War II.