The first USA secretary of state to visit Hiroshima, Kerry said President Barack Obama also wanted to travel to the city in southern Japan but he did not know whether the leader’s complex schedule would allow him to do so when he visits the country for a Group of Seven (G7) summit in May.
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United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, near the end of World War II.
No sitting US president has ever visited Hiroshima, out of concern that such a trip might be interpreted as an apology.
“I want to express on a personal level how deeply moved I am” to be the first USA secretary of state to visit Hiroshima, Kerry told reporters yesterday as he and his G7 counterparts wrapped up two days of talks.
Kerry was the highest-ranking USA administration official to pay respects at the spot where American planes launched the world’s first nuclear attack, in 1945. The nukes killed around 140,000 people and thousands of others were sickened by the radiation.
Kerry’s presence was “in no way, shape or form an endorsement of every caption or every label to an exhibit within the museum”, the State Department official said.
They agreed that the Japanese and USA governments will step up efforts to lighten the prefecture’s burden of hosting US bases.
However, a small group of about 30 protesters gathered in front of the atomic dome on Sunday to condemn the G7’s attitude and any Obama visit.
Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida, who represents Hiroshima in parliament, also hopes to issue a “Hiroshima Declaration” at the meeting to promote nuclear disarmament.
“It reminds everybody of the extraordinary complexity of choices in war and of what war does to people, to communities, to countries, to the world”, he said. “That he admires, as I think most of us do, the resilience and the determination of the people of Hiroshima, who have rebuilt with love in their hearts, not hatred”. One exhibit says Japan was on the verge of surrendering, but the United States dropped the bomb to justify the cost of the Manhattan Project. Since World War II, Japan has been a stalwart ally of the U.S.in the region and is home to about 50,000 US troops, the military’s biggest foreign deployment.
Mr Obama has previously said he would be honoured to visit both cities.
An advocate of nuclear disarmament, Obama has been eager to visit Hiroshima since taking office in 2009. Last year, when Japan pushed to include language recommending leaders visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a document released by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons review committee, China’s representative refused to agree.
Kerry stressed the need to end the threat of nuclear weapons and was critical of political candidates who advocate for increasing the United States’ nuclear arsenal. The G7 is comprised of the world’s seven most advance economies, namely the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan.
Kishida said, “For us to attain nuclear weapons is completely inconceivable”.
“Hi there, Obama. I understand how perplexed you must feel nowadays, but I think this is the time for you to gather your thoughts as a president of a nation”, the North Korean version of Honest Abe wrote in the state publication “North Korea Today”, according to translations reported in the Washington Post and English-language North Korean watchdog NK News.
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“We are prepared to get back to talks”.
