Tokyo letter: will Barack Obama visit Hiroshima?

After less than a year in office, US president Barack Obama famously bagged a Nobel Peace Prize for a thin pledge to build a world without nuclear weapons. So speculation is growing that he will make a pilgrimage to Hiroshima, which was incinerated by a US atomic bomb in 1945.

Obama will be in Japan next month for the G7 Summit; the venue, Ise Shrine, is a short hop from Hiroshima. On April 11th, John Kerry became the first US secretary of state to visit the city's Peace Memorial, essentially testing the political ground for his boss.

Though Kerry did not, as some expected he would, say sorry, he still took flak from Americans who say the bombing ended the second World War. “How stupid are you,” said one comment to his Twitter feed. Nuclear weapons saved “a million US soldiers” and many more Japanese.

The "Little Boy" uranium bomb that detonated over Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, killed some 70,000 people, mostly civilians. Tens of thousands more later died from burns and radiation-related illnesses. The destruction of the city, and Nagasaki three days later, are still the only instances of nuclear weapons used in warfare.

No meaning

Survivors have long demanded an act of contrition from the leader of the country that dropped them. “Yes, many want the president to apologise,” says Hirotami Yamada, who lost most of his family in the Nagasaki attack. “But it would have no meaning unless he lives up to his words to abolish nuclear weapons.”

Fewer Americans than at any time since 1945 believe the Hiroshima attack was justified. Even so, conservatives would be enraged at any admission of guilt for a war they say Japan started. A presidential apology might also make Japanese officials squirm.

Ahead of Obama's first visit to Japan in November 2009, for example, Mitoji Yabunaka, then Japan's vice-foreign minister, urged both governments to "temper" the public's expectations of a stopover in Hiroshima. "The idea of an apology . . . is a 'nonstarter'," said Yabunaka in a leaked cable to then US ambassador John Roos.

Both sides feared the visit would play into the hands of those opposed to Japan's military alliance with the United States.

Japan has sheltered for decades under the US nuclear umbrella and even hinted at building its own bomb. On April 1st, the cabinet confirmed a long-standing position that having nuclear weapons would not violate the constitution.

Still, the Americans may be inching toward some sort of gesture of remorse. Roos became the first US ambassador to Japan to attend the annual commemoration of the bombing in 2010. The following year, Washington for the first time sent an official representative to the ceremony in Nagasaki.

The only American president to visit Hiroshima is Jimmy Carter, though he had already left office. President Harry Truman, who ordered the bombings, never publicly veered from his claim that they saved lives. Near the end of his life, he offered to go to Japan to meet atomic survivors, but added: "I won't kiss their ass."

His successors have avoided expressions of moral ambiguity about the use of the bomb. Ronald Reagan reinforced the conservative argument that the atomic bombings were a necessary evil. Bill Clinton backed the shutdown of a full exploration of the bombings on their 50th anniversary in 1995.

No need to bow

Obama got a taste of what might be in store in 2009 when he bowed deeply to Japan’s emperor, Akihito, on the steps of his home.

Dick Cheney

, the former vice-president, led the right’s furious demand that the world’s most powerful man stand tall abroad. “There is no need for an American president to bow to anyone,” he said.

Atonement is complicated by Japan's domestic politics. Prime minister Shinzo Abe has built his career partly by pledging to end what his supporters see as the shameful apology diplomacy of the postwar years. He has made a string of what might charitably be called ambiguous statements about Japanese war crimes.

Last summer, Abe effectively replaced the nation’s gold standard mea culpa, issued by socialist prime minister Murayama Tomiichi in 1995, with a carefully worded statement in which he stopped short of offering his own words of remorse but said Japan “must not let . . . generations to come . . . be predestined to apologise”.

Given this context, a pilgrimage to what Dutch historian Ian Buruma calls "the centre of Japanese victimhood" would almost certainly open Obama to accusations that he is pandering to Japan's revisionists. Even for such a sure-footed, articulate politician, then, a trip to Hiroshima would be a tricky political balancing act.