Barack Obama probably could not have gone to the atomic bomb memorial in Hiroshima any earlier in his presidency than now. That is the political reality. So primed have his critics been to cast any statement more complex than “USA! USA!” as part of a shameful “apology tour” (background on phony “apology” accusations here and here), that visiting a site of unavoidable moral complexity might have drowned out whatever else he tried to do.
I am glad that Obama is going there now, while still in office, so he can become the first serving U.S. president to do so. And for reasons that have nothing to do with today’s nasty domestic politics, I am glad that he is emphasizing that his visit is an act of recognition, and responsibility, rather than “apology.”
The recognition is that 71 years ago, above this broad river-delta land in western Japan, human beings took a step in warfare even more destructive than those of previous millennia, a step that in principle might lead to annihilation.
Yes, war has always been hell. Yes, countless millions have died by sword and sling and siege and machine gun, including the very large numbers who perished in American firebombing of Japanese cities in the months before the atomic bomb. But to have read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, as it seemed all school children of my Boomer-era vintage were required to do, was to recognize atomic weaponry as something different. My friend Walter Shapiro, with whom I worked at the Washington Monthly in the 1970s and who later went to Japan on a Japan Society fellowship as I did with my family, has a powerful new article in RollCallon how fear of nuclear catastrophe dominated the 1950s and 1960s, and how odd and dangerous it is to have grown blasé about the threat. This disproportion between hyper-awareness of terrorist dangers, and a routine acceptance of worldwide nuclear arsenals, is also the theme of the Global Zero movement.
The responsibility involves acknowledging that the human beings who took this fateful step were Americans, and the human beings who died in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki were mainly Japanese. (“Mainly” because some Koreans, Chinese, Allied prisoners of war, and other foreigners were present—especially in Nagasaki, long one of Japan’s very few internationalized cities.)