27th May, 2016
The visit, the first by a sitting president to the city on which the United States dropped an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, could send ripples across Asia, a region still grappling with the echoes of World War II seven decades after it ended.
Leaders in both China and South Korea worry that Mr. Obama’s visit to Japan’s deepest wound could be taken by the Japanese as an endpoint to their country’s fitful efforts to come to grips with its wartime aggression.
But with a reclusive regime in North Korea furiously building more nuclear weapons and trying to perfect the missiles to deliver them, Mr. Obama decided that reminding the world why North Korea must be stopped was worth any hurt feelings among other countries.
“Part of the reason I’m going is because I want to once again underscore the very real risks that are out there and the sense of urgency that we all should have,” Mr. Obama said Thursday night.
More than 70 years later, the bombing still evokes powerful emotions, and the visit will not make everyone happy.
After arriving at nearby Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, where he briefly addressed a crowd of service members and others, the president traveled to Hiroshima. There, he was to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in the center of the city.
Mr. Obama has made clear that during his visit, which has been under consideration since the first days of his presidency, he will not apologize for President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop atomic weapons on Japan.
Many historians believe the bombings of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, on balance may have saved lives, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed. But the 30-acre Peace Memorial Park that Mr. Obama is to visit reflects none of that background.
A spare granite archway stands between the skeletal dome of a onetime industrial exhibition hall located directly under the spot where the bomb exploded and a museum housing the charred belongings of victims and other evidence of the devastation.
The park offers a victim’s narrative, illustrating in gut-wrenching detail how more than 100,000 people in the city, mostly civilians, perished and thousands more were burned, sickened by radiation poisoning or otherwise wounded. It provides few of the historical reasons for the bombing, such as descriptions of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the savagery of Japan’s occupation of China or the extraordinary death toll of soldiers and civilians in the invasion of Okinawa.
A short inscription on the park’s memorial arch reads, in part, “We shall not repeat the evil.” Which evil — the bombing or the war itself — and who is to blame are left unsaid.
Such failures by the Japanese to acknowledge their own role in the bombings have long bothered the Chinese, Koreans and others who suffered under the empire’s rule. And with Mr. Abe as Mr. Obama’s host, those wounded feelings could fester.
Mr. Abe has promoted a version of history that plays down Japan’s wartime transgressions, and he has moved to give the military limited powers to fight in foreign conflicts, shedding pacifist constraints in place since World War II.
South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, has not commented on Mr. Obama’s visit and is on a tour of several African countries.
But ruffling a few feathers seemed worth what could serve as a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences of a nuclear attack or mishap, Mr. Obama decided.
“So we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday of his nuclear nonproliferation efforts, adding: “And this is going to be an ongoing task, but it’s one that I think we have to be paying a lot of attention to.”