But for Tsuboi, who is being treated for cancer and heart disease that he attributes to his exposure to radiation as a young man, Obama’s visit should not be used as an excuse to dwell on the past. There is little prospect that views on the Hiroshima bombing in the US and Japan will ever converge. Rather than court the domestic political risks implicit in attempting to explain the decision to twice use nuclear weapons against Japan, Obama will “shine a spotlight on the tremendous and devastating human toll of war” and “honour the memory of all innocents who were lost”, said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. “When he made that speech in Prague he gave a lot of people reason to be hopeful, but what has he achieved in the seven years since then? I can’t help feeling that he won the Nobel peace prize on the back of a lie.” “Unless he is prepared to do that, then I see no point in him coming. “Before Obama apologises, he should acknowledge that dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a mistake – a war crime,” said Tadashi Sawada, a member of the Hiroshima Alliance for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons.
In the US, it is credited with hastening the end of a war that would have killed far more American soldiers had the land battle moved to the main Japanese island of Honshu.īy contrast, many Japanese view Hiroshima as an atrocity committed against a mainly civilian population, although there is recognition that the country’s militarist leaders should share responsibility for the attack. “The nuclear age came about because something had gone seriously wrong with humankind as a whole, not just with the US.”Īs their country’s leaders celebrate an unshakeable postwar military alliance, Japanese and American citizens have clung to their competing narratives over the Hiroshima bombing. “That America was the first to drop the bomb is a matter of historical fact, but if you keep insisting on an apology and it doesn’t come, then how are we ever going to join hands and make progress on nuclear disarmament?” added Tsuboi, who remained unconscious in hospital after the blast until more than a month after Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945. Photograph: Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty Images Sunao Tsuboi, 90, in front of a map showing the scale of the damage to Hiroshima. “I don’t think there’s any need for him to apologise,” said Sunao Tsuboi, a 20-year-old student on the day of the attack, who has become the public face of the hibakusha – the radiation-exposed survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While there is a general acceptance that no apology is necessary – and none will be offered – Hiroshima survivors say they want Obama to leave having reaffirmed the commitment he made in Prague in 2009 to “a world without nuclear weapons”. Many of the 180,000 survivors say they too expect Obama to bear witness to the unspeakable human cost of nuclear warfare, although reports suggest he will confine his visit to a tribute at the nearby cenotaph before making a short speech. “I want him to look at the exhibits and see what happened to the children here, and then to tell us how it makes him feel, not as a politician, but as a father.” “Obama is good at speaking from the heart – his words carry a lot of weight,” said Kenji Shiga, the museum’s director. Inside are the codes US presidents need to authorise a nuclear strike when they are away from established command centres such as the White House.Ī White House military aide carries a briefcase known as the ‘football’, containing emergency nuclear weapon codes. In an irony that will be lost on few residents of Hiroshima, he will be flanked, as protocol demands, by a military aide carrying a metal briefcase, covered in black leather, known as the “nuclear football”.
Obama may pause to contemplate the unforgiving force of a weapon capable of generating enough light and heat to leave the “shadow” of an unidentified victim etched into the stone steps of a bank. Like the dozens of schoolchildren snaking their way past the museum’s exhibits one afternoon this week, he may fall silent in front of a twisted tricycle belonging to a young boy who was among the 140,000 people who died that day and in the months that followed. Touring the museum – an experience his secretary of state, John Kerry, described as “gut-wrenching” – would bring him uncomfortably close to physical reminders of young lives ended in an instant 71 years ago, by a weapon used on the orders of a previous holder of his office.