IOC chief Bach to visit Hiroshima on July 16

TOKYO -- International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach will visit Hiroshima on Friday, July 16, to mark the start of the Olympic Truce, organizers said here on Wednesday.

Bach, who arrived in Tokyo on July 9, will lay a wreath at the cenotaph of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the location where an atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on August 6, 1945.

The IOC chief will also deliver a speech at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Seiko Hashimoto, president of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee, will accompany Bach for the visit, during which they will meet atomic bomb survivors.

The United States dropped the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and the second on Nagasaki three days later, killing about 210,000 people by the end of that year. The nuclear attacks finally brought the end of Japan's brutal and ugly colonization and invasion of many East Asian countries, and the Second World War.