Taking part in the annual World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates on behalf of this year's jailed winner, the exiled Wu'er Kaixi called on the summit to urge China to be "a responsible member of the international community."

China should "release Liu Xiaobo immediately and unconditionally," he said.

Liu, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison last December on subversion charges after co-authoring a manifesto calling for political reform in China, was announced as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in October, enraging Beijing.

Wu was joined by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader and five other past Nobel Peace laureates at the summit calling for an end to nuclear weapons held in Hiroshima, the city obliterated by a US atomic bomb attack in 1945.

Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba called on world leaders to work towards ridding the world of nuclear weapons in a speech opening a summit that underlined the Nobel's principles of peace and human rights.

"You are the peace leaders who can create the global awareness we need," he said, urging nations to "find the political will to find a way ...to rid the world of this plague".

On August 6, 1945, the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb that instantly killed tens of thousands in Hiroshima.

The United States has never acceded to demands in Japan for an apology for the loss of innocent lives in the atomic bombings, which many Western historians believe were necessary to bring a quick end to the war and avoid a land invasion that could have been even more costly.

US President Barack Obama, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize partly for his commitment to nuclear disarmament, missed the meeting due to a scheduling conflict with the Group of 20 meeting in Seoul and an APEC meeting in Japan.

Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who received the prize in 1990 for his role in ending the Cold War, also cancelled his visit for health reasons.

The presence of the Dalai Lama and a China democracy activist in Japan this weekend coincided with China's President Hu Jintao's trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo.

Their visits risk stoking a row between Tokyo and Beijing stemming from the arrest of a Chinese trawler captain, whose boat collided with Japanese patrol ships near disputed islands in the East China Sea in September.

The captain's arrest, near uninhabited islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, sparked a barrage of protests from Beijing that continued after Japan released him, with relations at their lowest point in years.

In addition to the Dalai Lama, five other Nobel Peace laureates are taking part in the three-day Hiroshima meeting.

Former chief of the UN atomic energy body Mohamed ElBaradei was joined by the founding coordinator of an anti-landmine NGO, Jody Williams, and Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer promoting human rights in Iran.

Former South African president FW de Klerk, credited with ending apartheid in the nation and Mairead Maguire, who led a campaign against violence in Northern Ireland, also attended.

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