We haven’t heard much lately about what critics call Barack Obama’s world apology tour, in which he has told foreigners how sorry he is for America’s past misdeeds. But over at the Power Line blog my American Enterprise Institute colleague Steven Hayward has linked to a September 28 story in the Japan Times about how Obama reportedly sought in fall 2009 to visit Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki, presumably to apologize for his predecessor Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on the two cities.
The information comes from Wikileaks, which published an August 2009 cable in which U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos reported that Japan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka characterizing the idea of Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize as a “non-starter.”
Wikileaks’s disclosure of contemporary diplomatic cables is reprehensible and threatens to choke off useful diplomacy. In light of that, Yabunaka and the Japanese Foreign Ministry have probably been wise in refusing to comment on the leaked cable. But it’s impossible to suppress information that has become public, and so it is worth nothing, as the Japan Times did, that on his visit to Tokyo in November 2009 Obama said he would be honored to visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki in the future. The bottom line appears to be that Japan nixed an apology Obama wanted to make to Japan.
