Obama honours victims of Hiroshima bombing
Ninety-one-year-old survivor ‘didn’t need an interpreter’ to understand U.S. president
HIROSHIMA, JAPAN— U.S. President Barack Obama laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on Friday, telling an audience that included survivors of America’s atomic bombing in 1945 that technology as devastating as nuclear arms demands a “moral revolution.”
Thousands of Japanese lined the route of the presidential motorcade to the memorial in the hopes of glimpsing Obama, the first sitting American president to visit the most potent symbol of the dawning of the nuclear age. Many watched the ceremony on their cellphones.
“Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” Obama said in opening his speech at the memorial.
“Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us,” Obama said, adding that such technology “requires a moral revolution as well.”
In an emotional moment afterward, Obama embraced and shook hands with survivors of the attack, which exposed humanity to risks the president has repeatedly said the world must do far more to resolve.
The first of those survivors, Sunao Tsuboi, a chairman of the Hiroshima branch of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations, gripped Obama’s hand and did not let go until he had spoken to him for some time.
“I held his hand, and we didn’t need an interpreter,” Tsuboi, 91, said later. “I could understand what he wanted to say by his expression.”
In his speech, Obama, using the slow and deliberate cadence that he uses on only the most formal and consequential occasions, said that the bombing of Hiroshima demonstrated that “mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”
But he said that in the 71years since the bombing, world institutions had grown up to help prevent a recurrence. Still, nations like the U.S. continue to possess thousands of nuclear weapons. And that is something that must change, he said.
People in Asian countries that were brutalized by imperial Japan had warned that a presidential apology at Hiroshima would be inappropriate. Obama not only did not apologize, he made clear that Japan, despite a highly advanced culture, was to blame for the war, which “grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes.”
In his own speech, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said, “This tragedy must not be allowed to occur again.
“We are determined to realize a world free of nuclear weapons.”