US President Barack Obama receives a wreath from a student as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe looks on at the cenotaph in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. (Photo: AFP)
US President Barack Obama on Friday became the first incumbent US President to visit Hiroshima, site of the world’s first atomic bombing, in a gesture Tokyo and Washington hope will showcase their alliance and reinvigorate efforts to rid the world of nuclear arms.
The two governments hope Mr Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, where a US atomic bomb killed thousands instantly on August 6, 1945, and some 140,000 by the year’s end, underscores a new level of reconciliation and tighter ties between the former enemies.
“We come to ponder the terrible force unleashed in the not so distant past,” Mr Obama said after laying a wreath at a Hiroshima peace memorial.
“We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans and a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us.”
Before laying the wreath, Mr Obama visited a museum where haunting displays include photographs of badly burned victims, the tattered and stained clothes they wore and statues depicting people with flesh melting from their limbs. “We have known the agony of war,” he wrote in the guest book. “Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.” After speaking, Mr Obama shook hands and chatted briefly with two atomic bomb survivors. Mr Obama and Sunao Tsuboi, 91, smiled as they exchanged words; Shigeaki Mori, 79, cried and was embraced by the President.
The city of Nagasaki was hit by a second nuclear bomb on August 9, 1945, and Japan surrendered six days later. Mr Obama’s main goal in Hiroshima was to showcase his nuclear disarmament agenda, for which he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. “Amongst those nations like my own that own nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them,” he said.
For atomic bomb survivor Eiji Hattori, Mr Obama’s remarks provided solace. “I think it was an apology,” said Hattori, 73, who was a toddler at the time of the bombing and now suffers from three types of cancer. “I didn’t think he’d go that far and say so much. I feel I’ve been saved somewhat ... For me, it was more than enough.”
Mori was also consoled by the President’s embrace. “It made me so happy that I thought I was walking on air,” he said.
Survivors said earlier an apology from Mr Obama would be welcome but for many, the priority was ridding the world of nuclear arms, a goal that seems as elusive as ever.
“I’m afraid I did not hear anything concrete about how he plans to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons,” said Miki Tsukishita, 75. “A-bomb survivors including me are getting older. Just cheering his visit is not enough.”
China and South Korea, which suffered from Japan’s wartime aggression, often complain it has not atoned sufficiently.
“It is worth focusing on Hiroshima, but it’s even more important that we should not forget Nanjing,” Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said on Friday, according to the ministry’s website. China says Japanese troops in 1937 killed 300,000 people in its then-capital of Nanjing.
A postwar Allied tribunal put the death toll at 142,000, but some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars deny a massacre took place at all. The Chinese state media also said that the “atomic bombings of Japan were of its own making” and accused present-day Japanese officials of “trying to portray Japan as the victim of World War II rather than one of its major perpetrators”.
Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea ridiculed the US President’s visit to Hiroshima as the “childish” diplomatic ploy of a “nuclear war fanatic.”
