Bringing it full circle?
The New York Time reported that President Obama will be visiting HIROSHIMA on 27th May 2016.
For decades, visitors to the ghostly dome in Hiroshima that stands like a sole survivor from the dropping of the atomic bomb have witnessed an unspeakable tragedy with historical amnesia.
The site, which President Obama will visit this month, reflected an almost universal Japanese view that the city was a victim of unnecessary brutality; parents and children incinerated, thousands killed and a generation poisoned by radiation.
President Obama added a couple of firsts to his list of achievements when he became the first sitting president to visit Myanmar and, later, Cuba. He will add another at the end of this month when he visits Hiroshima in conjunction with the Group of 7 leaders meeting in Japan.
President Obama added a couple of firsts to his list of achievements when he became the first sitting president to visit Myanmar and, later, Cuba. He will add another at the end of this month when he visits Hiroshima
New York Times writes: Though the White House is playing down expectations, the visit gives him a significant opportunity to offer some tangible new initiatives to advance his vision of a nuclear-free world, a major goal at the outset of his administration that has since faded against a host of other foreign policy challenges.
Apart from an appearance in 2010 by an American ambassador, John Roos, and Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to Hiroshima early last month, senior American officials have conspicuously avoided the war memorial for the 200,000 people who lost their lives in the two nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war in the Pacific. Given the 70-year alliance between Japan and the United States that has flourished since the end of the war, Mr Obama’s decision to visit the memorial seems well overdue.
Yet it was decided after an intense debate within the administration. Some officials were concerned that such an appearance would be interpreted as an apology for America’s wartime actions and further inflame this year’s presidential election. During Obama’s first year in office, his critics unfairly accused him of making an “apology tour” when he traveled to the Middle East and Europe in an effort to reset relationships that had deteriorated during the Bush administration.
The New York Times mentions that for Americans of the World War II generation, and many of their children, Hiroshima is at the center of a very different narrative. They believe President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb saved hundred of thousands of American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Honshu, Japan’s main island. Ask the few surviving veterans of that generation, those who fought their way from Iwo Jima to Okinawa and knew what was coming next, and there is no looking back at Truman’s decision, no moral equivalence between a Japanese campaign that killed more than 20 million in Asia and the horror of the bomb that ended it all.
With his decision to speak beneath that famous dome, Mr Obama is taking a step which was avoided by his predecessors. Merely by showing up in Hiroshima, he will have no choice but to navigate a minefield of conflicting memory, in Japan and in the United States.
The May 11th New York Times writes: “This visit will offer an opportunity tohonour the memory of all innocents who were lost during the war,” Mr Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Benjamin J. Rhode said that for a president who came to office talking of a world without nuclear weapons, a vision he has had more trouble realising than he could have imagined, it is also a chance to say, in the last months of his presidency, that the risk of new Hiroshimas is hardly gone.
Newer exhibits in Hiroshima have reminded visitors that the city was no random target, but a buzzing manufacturing hub of the Japanese war machine. “Some of us believe that when we think about the bomb, we should think about the war, too,” Hiroshima’s mayor said in 1994 while talking to the press who walked through the new exhibit, which Japanese rightists had opposed opening.
Yet even today, 22 years later, the sanitised accounts of the war taught to a new generation of Japanese school children largely avoid delving into the decision-making that led to the Pacific War. The vividness of Hiroshima has been melded with anodyne accounts of what preceded it, reinforcing the sense among Americans that, unlike Germany, Japan has never fully grappled with its past.
Many Japanese say the same of the United States. They remember that when the Smithsonian organised the first exhibition of the Enola Gay in 1995, for the 50th anniversary, veterans objected so loudly to the effort to conduct a dispassionate examination of the decision to drop the bomb — and its aftermath — that Congress held hearings and the museum’s director was forced to resign. The exhibition was watered down, and even today, when the famed B-29 can be seen at the Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center outside Dulles International Airport, any discussion of the short and long-term horrors of dropping the bomb are cursory, and the history behind it controversial.
The top American military leaders who fought World War II, much to the surprise of many who are not aware of the record, were quite clear that the atomic bomb was unnecessary, that Japan was on the verge of surrender, and — for many — that the destruction of large numbers of civilians was immoral, Gar Alperovitz, a leader of the movement to revise the United States own historical accounting, wrote last year in The Nation.
Richard Samuels, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written some of the most insightful works on Japan’s military, and the pre- and post-war cultures that surrounded it said that in Japan, there has been much real evolution, at least among the right wing and the amnesiacs who deny Japan’s destructive war in Asia and insist they were the victims. He thinks that for them, Obama’s visit will be a chance to reiterate that they were right.
Mr Samuels said it would be harder to predict the reaction in the United States. In the midst of a presidential campaign, he said, “this will be a rich target for those who say this is the next stop on the Obama apology tour.”
The top American military leaders who fought World War II, much to the surprise of many who are not aware of the record, were quite clear that the atomic bomb was unnecessary, that Japan was on the verge of surrender, and — for many — that the destruction of large numbers of civilians was immoral
David E Sanger who was a correspondent and bureau chief for The Times in Tokyo from 1988 to 1994, writes: But, if anything, the questions surrounding those last months of the Pacific War in 1945 have only grown stronger. The firebombing of Tokyo in March of that year resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths by some accounts. And many who questioned the decision to drop the atomic bomb have asked why it was not first exploded in an uninhabited place to demonstrate the dimensions of this new weapon’s power.
But the biggest change, Mr Samuels said, may come from the absence of witnesses. Twenty years ago, the Greatest Generation, people with a living memory of World War II, were still around. Today they are down to a precious few, and soon the only ones who will be debating the legacy of Hiroshima will not have felt the urgency to drop the bomb, or lived the horror of the result.
The result can only be seen, between now and May 27, when Mr Obama is to visit the site, the big question will be how views have evolved in both countries.
