asahi.com

The link is to a front page editorial of the English version of the Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper / news company.

Here are the key points from the editorial:

“Hiroshima,” a collection of photographs by Miyako Ishiuchi published by Shueisha Inc., contains one unforgettable picture. It shows a badly torn jacket of a schoolgirl who is believed to have been killed instantly. Her remains were never recovered.

According to the book, the jacket was found hanging from a bridge. As if in silent self-assertion, the girl’s name is clearly legible on the nametag sewn onto the jacket, which had been fashioned from her mother’s old kimono.

She was 13 when she died in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Were she alive today, she would be 78—perhaps enjoying tranquil Indian summer days in the autumn of her life.

[…]

It is a sad, poignant story, like many which are often run in Japanese newspapers at this time of year. As anyone who has lived in Japan discovers, the first week of August finds the various media replete with nuclear bombing stories.

But a new wind has begun to blow, giving us cause to hope for a world free of nuclear weapons. U.S. President Barack Obama last year spoke of America’s moral responsibility as the only country to have used a nuclear weapon, and appealed for “a world without nuclear weapons.”

Obama’s historic speech revived the “spring” of nuclear disarmament efforts that had dried up. Since then that spring grew into a creek and is now a running river.

Will this river grow? U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos attended this year’s Hiroshima peace memorial ceremony as the first U.S. envoy to do so. But even today, average Americans still justify the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It could not have been an easy decision for the White House to give Roos the green light to attend the ceremony.

Japanese writers are well aware of the common American beliefs about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And inevitably whenever this subject comes up on blogs that I’ve read there is no loss of voices making the claim that indeed the bombings were justified.

But the White House probably also wanted to test the waters, so to speak, and see how U.S. public opinion would react to the ambassador’s attendance.

I agree that this was indeed part of the reason for sending Ambassador Roos.

I hope strongly that Obama will visit Hiroshima someday. […]

This seems to be a common hope, from what I have seen of Japanese newspapers online.

Obama is a wise, learned man. What would he think of the jacket ripped from a 13-year-old girl by the blast of the atomic bomb, of people utterly deprived of their humanity and dignity in death? I would love to ask him this, if only to remind the nuclear superpower that what was done to Hiroshima was an act of absolute evil that can never be justified.

Here of course is where Japanese opinion diverges from that of many Americans.

I think it is very important for us in the US to accept that those in other countries who, even though they have been conquered by us and then move on to reconciliation with us nevertheless may, and often do, hold rather different views of what happened, and why.

We cannot presume that people in other nations will ever accept common American viewpoints. Why should they?

I can’t guess if President Obama will ever visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki, though I do think it would be a good thing for him to do.