First of all, the president has always shown a real respect for history-learning from history and looking forward at the same time.
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“But he is the president who has clearly said that as a country that has used nuclear weapon, it has moral responsibility”, he said.
“If he came to Hiroshima. right after he finished the speech in Prague, I think that’s a bit different”, he said. That’s the gift of declaring that we will not be undertaking the so called “modernization” of our nuclear arsenal at a cost of more than $ 30 Trillion over the next 30 years. “That is wrong”, said Shim Jin-tae, one of a small number of South Koreans at a protest outside the United States embassy in Seoul.
School textbooks have also been revised to put a positive light on Japan’s wartime history, and attempts made to change the country’s pacifist constitution that outlaws war as a means to settle global disputes.
Even today, nearly 71 years after the USA dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II, Michiko Yamaoka’s 91-year-old mother hates fiery sunsets.
The visit has been the result of many years of behind-the-scenes diplomacy.
The president has already announced that he’d not going with the intent of apologizing. Many in neighboring countries and the United States will want clear condemnation of Imperial Japan’s colonial and wartime atrocities – and not a whiff of anything that could be seen as an apology for what they see as justified bombs. There will be no apology, although some veterans’ groups in Japan have called for one. And the answer then and now is “no”. Germany has pretty much apologized for its hand in World War II.
“I always find it hard to try to make a decision that was made in 1945 through the lens of 2016”, Mineta, 84, said in an interview.
What would you like to see happen during his visit? . But President Obama must resist the temptation to continue his global apology tour and express regret for America being the first and so far only nation to employ this weaponry. Japan itself (particularly under the current Abe regime) has faced fierce criticism for the vagueness of its own statements about wartime atrocities inflicted by Japan, and has no desire to be shown up in an unfavorable light by a more honest apology from the United States. And that war should be the last resort.
Abe also pressed Obama to implement preventive measures. “Whether or not he can come as president, I don’t know”.
And I think that you do need to acknowledge the deep loss of life there, the significant loss of life that took place there. This is no more true that in the former Pacific theater of the Second World War, where continued vigorous debate and heated denials of such war crimes as the Nanjing Massacre and the sexual enslavement of Comfort Women continue over seventy years after the end of the Second World War. But I hope I was able to do it when I was there, I saw Secretary Kerry was able to do it, and I have no doubt that the president will be able to do it.
Hundreds of schoolchildren in navy blue and white uniforms singing the peace song “Orizuru” – or “Paper Crane” – that all students in Hiroshima learn in elementary school, visitors ringing the peace bell and crowds of Japanese people – from down the street to across the country – wanting to talk about their opposition to nuclear weapons.
“In proceeding with realignment of the USA forces without truly staying together with the feelings of the people in Okinawa, we will not be able to make progress”, he said.
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Mineta, who was 10 when his family was sent to the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming in 1942 and later represented the Silicon Valley area in the U.S. House from 1975 to 1995, has visited the Hiroshima memorial twice. And I remember as I was walking out of the ceremony, as a representative for the American people, they applauded with tears in their eyes. As one such citizen, I too would like to declare my unwavering support for your initiative. “So obviously it’s very meaningful and very important”. Because such mini nuclear weapons are a tremendous temptation for military commanders to use at the tactical level, they make the transition from a conventional weapon to a multiple nuclear warhead ICBM quite easy, even natural.
