President Obama, during a historic visit to Hiroshima on Friday, called on the world to change its mindset when it comes to war and to rely more on international diplomacy to resolve conflicts rather than deadly violence and bombs.
“We must change our mindset about war itself,” he said, “to prevent conflict through diplomacy and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun – to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition.”
Speaking broadly, Obama recalled the human species’ propensity for destruction, but also its ability to stop repeating mistakes.
“We’re not bound by some genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past,” he said. “We can learn, we can choose. We can tell our children a different story – one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.”
Just minutes earlier, Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe solemnly laid a wreath at Hiroshima’s Peace Park on a historic visit to the city where the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb at the end of World War II.
After Abe laid his own wreath, the two leaders shook hands.
In making the trip, Obama became the first sitting president to visit the city where more than 129,000 people were killed when President Truman decided to use the nuclear weapon in August 1945 in the final days of the war.
Obama offered no apologies or second-guessing of the decision, choosing instead to acknowledge the devastating toll of war and focus on the need to prevent another nuclear bombing.
“Seventy-one years ago on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” Obama told a crowd of Japanese and U.S. citizens, all clad in dark colors. “A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”
Obama also tried to explain why he decided to make the trip that his predecessors have avoided.
“We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past,” he said. “We come to mourn the dead … their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward to take stock of who we are and what we might become.”
The president spoke broadly about the 60 million death toll from WWII, of all the men, women, children “no different than us” who were “shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death.”
“There are sites around the world that chronicle this war … but in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction,” he said. “Of the spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our tool-making … those very things give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.”
When visitors come to Hiroshima, he said, they are forced to stand “in the middle of this city” and imagine the moment the bomb fell.
“We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see,” he said. “We listen to a silent cry – we remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the war that came before and the wars that would follow.”
Those painful memories require all people across the globe to “look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering,” he urged.
Speaking about the transformation in the U.S.-Japan relationship from bitter enemies to partners and friends, the memory of the toll of WWII, he said, “fuels our moral courage and allows us to change.”
It was a solemn event, and Obama did not take any questions from the media. During a press conference Thursday, he said he chose to make the visit because the dropping of the atomic bomb was “an inflection point in modern history – something that all of us have had to deal with in one way or another.”
“Obviously, it’s not as prominent in people’s thinking as it was during the Cold War at a time when our parents and grandparents were huddling under desks in frequent drills,” he said. “But the backdrop of a nuclear event remains something that presses on the back of our imaginations.”
The reason he decided to make the trip, he said, is to “underscore the real risks that are out there” when it comes to another nuclear bombing and the “sense of urgency we should all have.”
“It’s not only the terrible reminder of WWII and the deaths of innocents across continents,” he said. “It’s also a reminder that the job is not done” in reducing the world’s nuclear stockpile and, reducing conflict and building “institutions of peace.”
The U.S. delegation included Obama, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, and Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific Danny Russel.
Obama was greeted by Sunao Tsuboi, a Hiroshima bombing survivor at the age of 20 who became a peace activist and chairman of the Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-bomb Sufferers Organization.
“I never imagined [the president] would come while I am alive,” Tsuboi said in a statement. “We do not need apologies. I hope that he will present in Hiroshima what is good for the happiness of humankind. I would like to join hands with each other through the power of reason and beyond hatred.”
After his remarks, Obama and Abe shook hands with several of the guests of the U.S. delegation included 10 survivors of the blast, including:
Sigeaki Mori, a 79-year-old survivor who went on to create a memorial for American WWII prisoners of war killed by the Hiroshima bombing.
Tsugio Ito, 81, who survived the bombing as a child but lost his brother to radiation poisoning. Ito also lost his elder son Kazushige, who was working at the World Trade Center when it was attacked.
Yorie Kano, 73, whose younger brother and parents survived the bombing just 0.8 kilometer from the blast. Her brother died six months later from a stomach ailment.
The Kano family were second generation Japanese Americans born in Hawaii, who had returned to Japan before World War II. After the war, the Kano family returned to the United States and now live in California. This is her first visit to Japan in 45 years.
