TOKYO - President Barack Obama will have to deftly navigate an atomic minefield if he decides to visit Hiroshima, the city destroyed by the first atomic bomb 65 years ago, during his visit to Japan later this year.
The president is bound to step on one or two land mines whether or not he goes to Hiroshima. Even if he should do nothing but stand silently and be photographed looking at Atom Dome, the iconic emblem of the bombing, he could earn some criticism.
This month the Obama administration dispatched the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, John Roos, to the annual memorial held every August 6 in Hiroshima. It was the first time that an American ambassador had attended the memorial service, a point widely noted and appreciated in Japan.
Ambassador Roos' visit was short. He placed a wreath at the Cenotaph but did not speak. He did not visit the Dome or the Hiroshima Memorial Museum, with its grim pictures of the victims of the bombing, although he visited those sites during a trip he made shortly after arriving in Tokyo.
The Roos initiative can be seen as a kind of trial balloon for a possible presidential visit in November, when Obama will be in Japan attending the annual gabfest known as APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum), which is being held in Yokohama this year.
Obama has been invited - indeed, almost implored - to come to Hiroshima by Mayor Tadatohi Akiba. During his last visit to Japan in January, Obama replied cautiously that he "would like to visit Hiroshima," which would seem to leave him an out if he wants one.
Nevertheless, a head of steam is building in Japan that Obama should visit the city and perhaps Nagasaki as well. A decision not to go would be a major snub. Yet Obama would open himself up to considerable criticism at home, as it is a political trope among conservatives that he goes around the globe apologizing to everyone.
The U.S. domestic reaction to the Roos visit seems to have been fairly muted; conservative Obama critics may have other priorities for the moment. But then Roos is merely an ambassador. They might react differently to a presidential visit.
The August 6 anniversary usually passes mostly unnoticed in the U.S., but it is a big deal in Japan. Not only is there a solemn ceremony in Hiroshima, but there are displays of the bombing and its effects all over the country. Newspapers play up the story with articles and interviews with aging survivors.
This year the observance seemed to be an even bigger deal, with Hiroshima residents and others committed to nuclear disarmament perhaps invigorated by the presence; not only of the U.S. ambassador, but also the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon.
Moreover, expectations have been raised - perhaps unrealistically high - by Obama's own words. His phrase calling for a "world without nuclear arms," made during a speech in Prague early in his presidency, and even his winning the Nobel Prize for Peace are repeated endlessly.
The mayor felt emboldened to direct some pointed questions at his own government this year, calling for Tokyo to renounced the "nuclear umbrella" that the U.S. provides Japan, and demanding that the "Three Nos" - not to use, possess or allow into the country any nuclear weapons - be made a law, not just a statement of policy. Prime Minister Naoto Kan deftly sidestepped the demands, reaffirming Tokyo's commitment to the nuclear umbrella and to the Three Nos, but without promising to turn them into law.
The Japanese press is poised to pounce with questions along the lines of "do you agree with President Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb?" Indeed, they already have during Obama's earlier visit to Tokyo. Such inevitable questions will tax his speech writers' abilities to produce creative obfuscation to the limit.
Yet any deviation from the accepted view in America that the twin atomic bombings were necessary to end the war and save even more lives, both of Japanese and invading GIs, will bring forth a firestorm of criticism in the U.S. If he defends the decision to drop the bomb he'll injure relations with Japan; if he doesn't, he opens himself to criticism from the right at home.
The Japanese government has never demanded an apology for the atomic bomb attacks and is not doing so now, even though it has made several formal apologies to China and Korea about its actions during World War II. Even at this writing, Kan's cabinet is preparing an apology to South Korea to mark the 100th anniversary of Japan's annexation of the country in 1910.
Japan has never apologized for its attack on Pearl Harbor nor has a leader visited the USS Arizona memorial site. However, the Emperor Akihito has paid his nation's respects by laying a wreath at the Punch Bowl National Cemetery in Hawaii, and his father, the wartime Emperor Hirohito, did the same at Arlington during a visit to the U.S. in the 1970s.
Though some Japanese (and even some Americans) denounce the atomic bombings as a war crime, most Japanese are not unsympathetic to the idea that the bombings brought the war to a quick close. They just wish the Americans were more sensitive to the lives (mostly civilian) lost, and didn't constantly prattle on about the GI lives that were saved.
If Obama can keep things on that level - a universal respect for the dead - then a trip to Hiroshima might be a success. Otherwise, he may have cause to wish that the APEC was holding its meeting this year in Bali.
