Aug. 29, 6pm The Latest NEWS

Saturday, August twenty-ninth, this is The Asahi Shimbun Asia and Japan Watch news briefing.

Interview/ Takashi Hirooka, ex-Hiroshima mayor discusses war, A-bomb, hibakusha.

Hiroshima, a former longtime journalist who went on to serve as Hiroshima mayor said he believes that Japan, reborn as a pacifist nation after World War II, is at a crossroads now.

In a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Takashi Hirooka, ninety-eight, shared his views of Japan as seen through the eyes of someone who knows the years before, during, and after the war.

Hirooka was an expat in Japanese Korea when the war ended and became a Hiroshima-based journalist before going on to serve as mayor of the city during his life of nearly a century.

The interview was conducted ahead of the eighty-first anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city.

Excerpts of the interview follow.