“We have composed a draft of the letter to President Obama in the names of all the association’s members”, said Shim Jin-tae, 74, head of the association’s Hapcheon branch, on May 11. But lack of an apology should not detract from the significance of the historic visit, during which he will be accompanied by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
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Since the bombings, most survivors have chosen to be living testimonies of the horrors of atomic weapons to remind the world to never repeat nuclear war. “While the South Korean government should be blamed for its apathy and diplomatic ineptitude, even more blame is due to Japan for not acknowledging its wars of aggression and its colonial rule and to the United States for sheltering Japan and for avoiding its responsibility for being the first country to drop an atomic bomb”. “From the Japanese perspective, it is certainly preferable to have a US president visit Hiroshima even without an apology in his luggage, than him not coming at all”.
The U.S. dropped a second devastating atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki three days later.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Tuesday that Obama’s trip to the Peace Memorial Park near ground zero should not be interpreted as tantamount to an apology.
Things started to cool down when Japan signed a peace treaty with the US and other nations in 1951. “And for Americans of my generation – I was in high school when the war ended – to hear the Vietnamese say that they want to have a strategic relationship with us is an enormous advantage for the U.S.”.
Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama would “not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb”, and instead spotlight the toll of war and offer a forward-looking vision of a non-nuclear world. Historians are split. Buruma said camps include those who believe President Harry Truman, barely sworn in, failed to stop bureaucratic momentum toward using a weapon that took so long to develop.
What is then important will be what Obama will actually do and say during in Hiroshima. There is a risk the president’s visit to the bombed areas will be criticized as “apology diplomacy”.
Kerry and other G7 foreign ministers made the landmark visit on April 11 to the memorial site for the world’s first nuclear attack in Hiroshima. But such a statement comes amid a global dearth of momentum for efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons.
If Mr. Obama’s new beginning with Muslims became collateral damage amid his widely panned reactions to the Arab Spring, the war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State, what can be said of his nuclear non-proliferation agenda?
Abe expressed solemnly and without alluding to the rights or wrongs of history, that “Japan is the only country to be hit by a nuclear weapon, and we have a responsibility to make sure that awful experience is never repeated anywhere”.
Michael Douglas attends a news conference on nuclear disarmament a the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland May 12, 2016. North Korea meanwhile continues to defy worldwide sanctions to conduct nuclear weapons tests.
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So, he must have thought that visiting Hiroshima could lend a symbolic complement to his signature initiative. For good reason: The hollowed core of the citys A-Bomb Dome and old photos of charred children are sure to rekindle questions of guilt and penitence for World War IIs gruesome brutality.
