“Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed”, Mr Obama said in opening his speech at the memorial.
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Ishikawa volunteered to join the Army while he and his family were interned in the U.S. Government’s Tule Lake concentration camp.
“The suffering, such as illness, gets carried on over the generations – that is what I want President Obama to know”, she said.
His call for abolishing nuclear weapons was and remains pure subterfuge.
Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (shin-zoh ah-bay) entered the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where Obama is expected to sign a guest book.
His visit, however, only served part of what Obama is believed to be trying to achieve, running the risk of being understood as an act of hypocrisy and presumptuousness by giving the Japanese the false sense of victimhood and exonerating them for killing and ruining the lives of millions of Koreans and Chinese. America’s Nobel Prize-winning president and his aides made it abundantly clear from the moment that the trip was first proposed that he would do no such thing. The surrender also kept the Soviet Union from entering the war against Japan, which in turn prevented the kind of post-war partition that devastated East Germany for 50 years.
At Hiroshima, Obama was silent on the question of American sacrifice, American valor, and American virtue, but eloquent on the issue of American guilt.
Shim Jin-tae (centre), chairperson of the Hapcheon chapter of the Korea Atomic Bombs Victim Association, shows the letter the group wrote to US President Barack Obama, at Hiroshima Peace Park, May 27.
On August 6, 1945, an American atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, Japan.
The nuclear buildup is being prosecuted in the context of an ever-growing escalation of US military provocations on the borders of the world’s other two largest nuclear powers, with US troops and antimissile systems being deployed on Russia’s western flank and the US Navy conducting continuous “freedom of navigation” operations in territorial waters claimed by China.
This is a declaration of his determination to reinforce his efforts toward the reduction and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, based on his 2009 speech in Prague, where he called for a nuclear-free world. Instead, he plans to acknowledge the devastating toll of war and couple it with a message that the world can – and must do – better.
World War Two flying ace Dean “Diz” Laird, 95, who shot down Japanese fighters and dropped bombs on Tokyo, said he was pleased both that Obama was going to Hiroshima and that he would offer no apology.
The president says his visit is a testament to how even the most painful divides can be bridged. Mori spent decades researching the fates of US prisoners of war who were killed in the bombing.
Obama added: “It’s a chance to reaffirm our commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world where nuclear weapons would no longer be necessary”.
Abe says what happened in Hiroshima should never be repeated. But as in all such cases of historical import, it may not be valid to critique in hindsight certain decisions taken by a nation’s highest political authority in the dust and fog that a protracted conflict such as World War II poses.
Obama will become the first sitting USA president to visit Hiroshima’s hallowed ground on Friday.
Fujimoto hopes the President’s visit will encourage others to visit the Peace Park and find both healing and hope for the future.
Bomb survivor Kinuyo Ikegami, 82, paid her own respects at the cenotaph early Friday, before the politicians arrived.
Long lines of schoolchildren took turns bowing and praying beside her.
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Weighing in on the race to succeed him with his strongest broadside yet against Trump, Obama said fellow leaders from the Group of Seven nations “are surprised by the Republican nominee”.
