A man walks amid the ruins after the explosion of an atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.
Photo Credit: AP File.
Candles are lit around the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, Japan
Photo Credit: CNN.COM
On Tuesday (May 10), the White House announced that President Obama is planning to visit Hiroshima, Japan later this month (May 27), becoming the first sitting U.S. President to visit the city, since the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped an atomic bomb at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, near the end of World War II, killing an estimated 140,000 people.
Three days later, on August 9, the U.S. dropped a plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on the city of Nagasaki.
On August 15, 1945, six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan surrendered to Allied Forces.
The bombings were the two and only times that nuclear weapons have been used in the theater of war.
The White House made it clear that Mr. Obama will not issue a formal apology for the atrocities inflicted on innocent Japanese victims. Rather, his visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is intended solely to highlight the president’s personal commitment with pursuing peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons.
A great many observers roundly applaud Mr. Obama’s historic gesture.
According to Thomas Berger, Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, despite all the damage meted out in Hiroshima, remarkably, there is little bitterness still simmering from the bombings. ``This is a trip,’’ Berger said, `` that will undoubtedly be welcomed by the people of Hiroshima, and of Japan in general.’’
``The suffering of the atomic bombings’’ Berger explained, `` has been channeled instead into a fervently held desire that not only Japan, but that the whole world should turn away from the path of war and destruction. Often this is expressed through a Buddhist sensibility, one that seeks spiritual peace by seeing through the illusions of pain, suffering and struggle in this world - in short enlightenment.’’
If there is to be a chorus of condemnation, Berger reasons, it will most likely come from Japan’s Asian neighbors, Korea and China, who might feel that President Obama’s visit is fueling `` Japan's well-developed sense of victimization without acknowledging the broader context of the bombing, in which Japan victimized its neighbors through a policy of aggression and colonial domination.’’
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, firmly believes that Mr. Obama’s trip is not only historic, but courageous as well.
``I believe his decision not to revisit the U.S. decision to drop the bomb is the right decision’’ Hasegawa said. `` It is wrong to apologize for the use of the atomic bomb, although I deplore it, as long as the Japanese as a whole have not come to terms with their crime to start that terrible war.’’
Hiromi Ninomiya, a native of Hiroshima, who now resides in Fort Lauderdale Fla., working as an academic advisor, couldn't be more thrilled with the president's scheduled trip to her hometown.
``President Obama's visit to Hiroshima'' Ninomiya told me, `` is a great step forward in spreading the message to the world, not to repeat the tragic wars and the use of nuclear weapons. This is the message that I have been taught every summer school on August 6th since I was little as growing up in Hiroshima.''
Ninomiya expressed to me that since her grandfather was a survivor of the atomic bomb, she has a responsibility to keep passing the message on to the next generation. ``Someone like the President of the United States' visit to Hiroshima is more powerful than anything else to spread the message'' Ninomiya says.
`` I appreciate his visit to Hiroshima, including the many American citizens and those around the world who have visited Hiroshima. I would like everyone to witness for themselves this beautiful city with its abundance in greens, flowers, rivers and mountains, and to fully appreciate that we all just want peace. I love the city and am so proud of where I am from.’’
Hiroshima: Did You Know……?
- Hiroshima today is approximately 350 square miles, population-1.2 million.
- The origins of the City date back to 1589 when Mori Terumoto, a feudal lord, built Hiroshima Castle (also referred to as Rijo, or Carp Castle) at the large delta of the Ota-gawa River.
- Because the delta resembled a large island, the area was called "Hiroshima," or 'wide island' in Japanese.
- Some 1.2 million people visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum annually.
- Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum designed by Mr. Kenzo Tange, opened in 1955, aiming to convey the reality of the damage incurred by an atomic bomb to people around the world, and to contribute to the elimination of nuclear weapons and the understanding of everlasting world peace.
- Prior to August 1945, Hiroshima was a military city, which it assumed in 1871, when the Imperial Headquarters, the site of the highest military command, was moved there from Tokyo.
- Beginning in March 1945, U.S. bombers conducted a campaign of air attacks against Japanese cities that killed more than 330,000 civilians and wounded 472,000, made more than 8 million homeless, and burned more than 177 square miles of urban area.
- Eight of the 25 cities bombed during the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, or roughly a third, had destruction equal to or greater that that at Hiroshima.
- At 8:15 AM, on August 6, the B-29 Bomber, the Enola Gay, carrying a 4,000-kilogram (9,000-pound) uranium bomb, nicknamed ``Little Boy'' dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
- The bomb wrecked 13 square kilometers (5 square miles) of the city and killed 80,000 people instantly. An additional 40,000 died from radiation effects, making it the worst bombing raid of the war.
- According to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, almost 63 percent of the buildings in Hiroshima were completely destroyed after the bombing and nearly 92 percent of the structures in the city had been either destroyed or damaged by blast and fire.
- The United States spent $2 billion building the atomic bomb.
- The Hiroshima Bomb was the equivalent of 16 kilotons of TNT.
- 20,000 Koreans died in Hiroshima.
- According to Frederick R. Dickinson, Professor of Japanese History at the University of Pennsylvania, there were approximately 11,000 Japanese Americans living in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. A disproportionally large number of Japanese from Hiroshima had migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century and a good number of their children were living in Hiroshima in 1945.
- T. Steen, an Adjunct Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Georgetown’s School of Medicine interviewed Dr. Kiyoshi Hama, a Japanese doctor from Kyushu University in Fukuoka who went to Nagasaki right after the bomb to treat survivors. He said in an interview that in particular, photos showing the destruction of churches in Nagasaki were confiscated so as not to be witnessed by a majority Christian American media audience. In fact, the epicenter of the Nagasaki bomb was the area where the highest population of Japanese Christians lived, and the major church was destroyed by the bomb. Many people lived there were very poor also.
- In 1949, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law passed the National Diet, allocating state subsidy for the city’s reconstruction.
- According to Japanese Historian Shigeaki Mori, it was not until June 27, 1985, that the U.S. government acknowledged that 12 American POWs were killed by the atomic bomb, when President Ronald Reagan read out the names of the twelve at a small ceremony attended only by relatives of the victims.
- A 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that 56 percent of Americans believe the use of nuclear weapons was justified with 34 percent saying it was not. In Japan, only 14 percent say the bombing was justified, compared with 79 percent who say it was not.
- The survey also revealed the U.S. public’s opposition to a formal apology for the use of atomic bombs: 20 percent supported an apology and 73 percent did not.
- Opinion polls in Japan indicate that the Japanese public overwhelmingly supports (nearly 75 percent in a recent poll) an Obama visit to Hiroshima.
-Bill Lucey
May 11, 2016
Source: ``The Winning Weapon: Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima’’ By Ward Wilson, Journal Article, International Security, volume 31, issue 4, pages 162-179 Spring 2007; ``Ruin as Cultural Heritage: Architectural Survivors of Hiroshima’’ By Akiko Takenaka, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of History University of Kentucky; Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
