There are political foes at home who are ready to seize on any hint of an unwelcome expression of regret. His choreographed visit will be parsed by people with many agendas. Jimmy Carter visited as a former president in 1984.Įven now, when polls find 70 percent of the Japanese support Obama’s decision to come to Hiroshima, Obama’s visit is fraught. Other American presidents considered coming, but the politics were still too sensitive, the emotions too raw. Obama’s visit is a moment 70 years in the making. “I want him to understand our sufferings.” “The suffering, such as illness, gets carried on over the generations - that is what I want President Obama to know,” she said. Han Jeong-soon, the 58-year-old daughter of a Korean survivor, was there too. “I could hear schoolchildren screaming: ‘Help me! Help me!’” she said.
Tears ran down her face as she described the immediate aftermath of the bomb.
The president will be accompanied on his visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe - a demonstration of the friendship that exists between the only nation ever to use an atomic bomb and the only nation ever to have suffered from one.īomb survivor Kinuyo Ikegami, 82, paid her own respects at the cenotaph on Friday morning, well before Obama arrived, lighting incense and chanting a prayer. The skeletal remains of the exhibition hall have become an international symbol of peace and a place for prayer. Those who come to ground zero at Hiroshima speak of its emotional impact, of the searing imagery of the exposed steel beams on the iconic A-bomb dome. It is a place, he said, “to remind ourselves that the job’s not done in reducing conflict, building institutions of peace and reducing the prospect of nuclear war in the future.” Hiroshima is much more than “a reminder of the terrible toll in World War II and the death of innocents across the continents,” Obama said Thursday. A second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki three days later, killed 70,000 more.
He will look back, placing a wreath at the centopath, an arched monument in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park honoring those killed by the bomb that U.S. Rather, Obama aimed to offer a simple reflection, acknowledging the devastating toll of war and coupling it with a message that the world can - and must - do better.
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