“‘Water, please.’ Voices from the brink of death are still lodged in the memory of a boy who was 15 and a junior high student,” Matsui said in his speech, referring to the memories of a survivor.

“The pleas were from younger students. Their badly burned, grotesquely swollen faces, eyebrows and eyelashes singed off, school uniforms in ragged tatters,” he added.

Nearly 45,000 people attended the ceremony in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, located near the site of the 1945 attack.

In attendance were also aging survivors, relatives, government officials and foreign delegates who stood for a minute of silence in the rain at 8:15 am local time [23:45 GMT], when a US B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb killing about 140,000 people 69 years ago.

A second bombing followed three days later on the city of Nagasaki killing an additional 70,000 people causing Japan to surrender on August 15, 1945, bringing World War II to a close.

Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki harbor strong anti-nuclear sentiments, with Matsui calling atomic bombs, “the absolute evil.”

Anti-nuclear attitudes flared after the Fukushima Daiichi incident in 2011, the worst atomic disaster since the Chernobyl incident of 1986. An earthquake led to dangerous reactor meltdowns, resulting in a spread of radiation, forcing thousands of people living in the area to relocate.