President Barack Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, Japan, the White House announced Tuesday, making a fraught stop this month at the site where the United States dropped an atomic bomb at the end of World War II.
The visit, hotly debated in the White House for months as the president planned a trip to Vietnam and Japan, carries weighty symbolism for Obama, who is loath to be seen as apologizing for that chapter in U.S. history.
“He will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, his deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, said in a blog post on Medium. “Instead, he will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future.”
“In making this visit, the president will shine a spotlight on the tremendous and devastating human toll of war,” Rhodes added in the blog post.
Obama’s critics have often accused him of making an “apology tour” during the first year of his presidency, pointing to his travels to the Middle East and Europe during that period, when he gave a series of speeches acknowledging past misdeeds by the United States and seeking to rebuild ties frayed at the end of the Bush administration.
But the president’s advisers say a trip to Hiroshima is in keeping with his emphasis on reducing the spread of nuclear weapons, including through a deal completed last year to lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for new restrictions on Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear bomb.
“The president’s time in Hiroshima also will reaffirm America’s long-standing commitment — and the president’s personal commitment — to pursue the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Rhodes wrote.
Japanese officials avoided any suggestion that they viewed the visit as tantamount to a U.S. apology. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe framed it as a chance to honor the dead and support the cause of nuclear disarmament.
“Japan is the only country to be hit by a nuclear weapon, and we have a responsibility to make sure that terrible experience is never repeated anywhere,” Abe said.
The mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, welcomed the visit but said in a statement that he wanted Obama to outline “concrete steps” to further the cause of disarmament. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the bombing, Matsui accused “selfish” nuclear powers, including the United States, of standing in the way of that cause by insisting on maintaining their arsenals.
Sunao Tsuboi, 91, a leading anti-nuclear activist in Hiroshima, who was burned by the bomb blast on Aug. 6, 1945, also welcomed Obama’s visit, which he said he hoped would “project a broad anti-nuclear message.”
“I was one of the first people who said Obama should visit Hiroshima,” he told NHK, Japan’s national public broadcaster. “Good for him for coming.”
For decades, U.S. diplomats largely avoided Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese city where the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Aug. 9, 1945. That changed in August 2010, when John V. Roos, the U.S. ambassador at the time, attended a commemoration in Hiroshima. His successor, Caroline Kennedy, has also attended.
Former President Jimmy Carter toured the Hiroshima memorial in May 1984, three years and four months after he left office, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., visited the memorial in 2008 when she was speaker of the House.
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