Some survivors, relatives of victims, government officials and foreign delegations remained motionless at 08H15 (23h15 GMT) when he touched a bell gave the signal for a minute of silence.
At that same time, the August 6, 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay took off the bomb that transformed the city into a nuclear inferno, an act for which the United States has never apologized, as it has not done for Nagasaki, bombed August 9.
In fact, no American president in office has never visited any of these cities.
Around Peace memorial in Hiroshima, and not far from the "Dome of Genbaku" emblematic of the cataclysmic ruin crowned by a mass of iron twisted by nuclear heat, many people have gathered here to pray, lay flowers.
"It is a day of deep reflection and a renewed commitment to build a more peaceful compromise," said U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy.
About 140,000 people died in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki immediately or by exposure to radiation, between the moment of impact of bombs and the following December.
These two attacks precipitated the surrender of Japan and the end of the Second World War, August 15, 1945.
Tireless activist against nuclear weapons, the Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, invited President Barack Obama "and all the leaders of nations possessing nuclear weapons to visit the cities of the pump as soon as possible."
"If you do, be convinced that nuclear weapons are an absolute evil and should not be allowed to exist," said Komatsu.
The mayor took the opportunity to criticize the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who in early July "reinterpreted" the country's pacifist constitution to allow Japanese forces participating in external military operations.
Guilty of being alive
Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution enshrines Japan's pacifism and renunciation "forever" to war.
"Our government should accept the fact that for 69 years we have avoided war precisely because the noble pacifism of the Constitution," said Matsui Mazuo.
Sixty-nine years after the horror, many of the survivors of hell - to which it is known in Japan as 'hibakusha' - guilty of being alive when so many others have died or have never been able to testify to the cruelty of feel war, the mayor recalled.
But he added, those silent for so many years, loaded with these terrible memories, start talking at the end of their lives.
As Shigeji Yonekura, 81: "It is sad to see disappear every year my friends 'hibakusha' but I keep telling my ordeal youth while you can," he told AFP.
Match: According to the American press, the last member of the crew of the Enola Gay bomber, Theodore van Kirk, died at age 93 and was buried on Tuesday 5 August.
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