PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell.
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There are blast survivors who want Obama to listen to their stories, to see their scars – physical and otherwise.
The president also is expected to renew his push for a world without nuclear weapons, an aspiration for which he received a Nobel Peace Prize early in his presidency but has since seen uneven progress.
Obama went on to say “we’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past”.
Shigeaki Mori, 79, appeared overwhelmed with emotion as he shook hands with US President Barack Obama after a highly-charged ceremony in Hiroshima.
Abe called Obama’s decision to come to Hiroshima courageous and said it showed the ties between two nations that have transformed from enemies into friends.
The visit presented a diplomatic tightrope for a USA president trying to make history without ripping open old wounds.
People in Asian countries that were brutalised by imperial Japan had warned that a presidential apology at Hiroshima would be inappropriate. He signed a guest book at the memorial, writing, “Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons”.
“We come to Hiroshima to ponder the bad forces unleashed in the not so distant past”.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has attacked President Barack Obama for not mentioning the deadly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 during his historic trip to Japan this week.
It was further said that “Obama is seized with the wild ambition to dominate the world by dint of the U.S. nuclear edge”.
On Saturday, a day after Barack Obama left, there was gratitude – wonder, even – that he had become the first sitting USA president to visit the place where the nuclear age began. In America, the dominant view holds that the nuclear attacks that killed more than 200,000 were necessary to quickly end the war and save a greater number of American – and Japanese – lives that otherwise would have been lost. “You can never tell how people’s minds work”, she said.
Jimmy Carter visited the atomic bomb memorial in Hiroshima in 1984, after he had left office. “I hope many people will think about A-bomb”.
Later, Obama said, “Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction”.
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Every resident asked for an end to war, and many asked for the end of nuclear weapons as well. Mori was just 8 when the “Little Boy” atomic bomb, the first nuclear weapon ever used in an attack, was dropped the morning of August 6, 1945, which helped bring an end to World War II.
