IT WAS a day for remembering the victims of one of history’s greatest mass killings, but most of the attention was on a middle-aged man sitting among the 55,000 people watching yesterday’s memorial ceremony in Hiroshima.
John Roos, America’s ambassador to Japan, was one of a record 74 foreign envoys who fell silent at 8.15am – the time the Little Boy detonated over the city on August 6th, 1945. For survivors of the blast that reduced Hiroshima to ashes and took 140,000 lives, though, his presence loomed by far the largest.
“It’s very important to us that he came,” said Hiroshi Takayama (80), who was working in a factory with his schoolmates when he felt the searing blast from the bomb.
“We’ve been telling people for 65 years not to use these weapons, but these people have never showed up until now. If they cared, they would have come to see the facts for themselves.”
Known in Japan as hibakusha, the survivors believe that the decision by the US, Britain and France to send official delegates to the city for the first time is a sign that the global momentum for disarmament is building. However, Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, immediately threw cold water on their hopes yesterday when he defended the US nuclear deterrent, saying it was “necessary for our nation”.
Mr Kan was responding to a demand from Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba that Japan scrap its reliance on the US nuclear umbrella. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon also told the Hiroshima crowd it was time for the world to move from “Ground Zero to Global Zero” – a world without nuclear arms. “Of course that’s what we want,” said Yoshimichi Ishimaru, the son of a Hiroshima hibakusha. “We know that if we scrap the nuclear deterrent, we have to begin to question the whole defence treaty with America, and that’s very difficult, but Hiroshima can’t just think about the national interest – it must consider the whole of humanity.”
Hiroshima natives have long resented the political calculations needed to maintain Japan’s 60- year-old military alliance with its old enemy. Many say the nation’s post-Hiroshima non-nuclear principles – never to produce, possess or allow the entry of nuclear weapons into the country – have been betrayed by US and Japanese leaders.
As a Japanese government inquiry looks set to prove, Washington and Tokyo struck a backroom deal decades ago allowing nuclear-armed US ships and aircraft to traffic anywhere through or over Japanese territory.
Former prime minister Eisaku Sato, who helped to broker the deal, won the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to any plans for a Japanese nuclear-weapons programme.
Survivors are pinning their hopes on US president Barack Obama, whom they believe will be the first American leader to visit Hiroshima. “We hope that Mr Obama will come and see with his own eyes what happens after you use a nuclear weapon,” said Akihiro Takahashi (79), a hibakusha and former director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
Like other survivors, he has been writing to US presidents for years inviting them to visit. “If he comes, we would be one step closer to total abolition.”
Mr Takayama recalled hearing the drone of a single B29 bomber flying overhead as he worked in the factory on August 6th, 1945. “We even laughed because at that stage [after so much aerial bombing], a single plane was considered pretty meaningless.
“All of a sudden there was an extremely bright flash and everything in the world was bathed in intense light and heat. Then everything turned pitch black.”
He said the presence of Mr Roos yesterday meant that “a shut door has been opened”. Eventually, Mr Obama may come too. “It’s not about an apology,” he said. “From him, I want everybody to know about the importance of stopping nuclear weapons.”