Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, December 3, 1994                   TAG: 9412060018
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: TOKYO                                 LENGTH: Medium

JAPANESE OFFENDED BY STAMP

A planned American commemorative stamp, declaring that atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ``hastened'' the end of World War II, is an ``affront to the feelings of the Japanese people,'' Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama declared Friday night.

``We must make Japan's thinking known to the United States in an appropriate way,'' the Socialist leader told reporters.

The stamp, to be issued by the U.S. Postal Service next year as one of a series to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, depicts an atomic bomb mushroom cloud and carries a caption reading, ``atomic bombs hasten the war's end, August, 1945.''

The flare-up marked the second acrimonious dispute that has erupted between the United States and Japan over the upcoming anniversary.

Plans by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and artifacts of the bomb's effects on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stirred protests from American veterans' groups and Congress.

They complained that depictions of the suffering caused by the devices' use distorted the historical backdrop of the bombings. In the wake of the protests, the Smithsonian agreed to remove part of the displays showing the devastation caused by the bombs.

Americans generally believe that the bombs - which killed about 140,000 of Hiroshima's 340,000 residents and 70,000 of Nagasaki's 270,000 population through the end of 1945 - saved hundreds of thousands of American troops.

But the Japanese feel that the civilian toll and the survivors' distress over radiation illnesses even decades later made the attacks inhuman and unjustifiable for any reason.