There is widespread support in Japan for Obama's call for an end to nuclear weapons, writes DAVID MCNEILL
IT WAS a speech Tsutomu Yamaguchi waited 64 years to hear. Watching television at home in Hiroshima in April, one of Japan’s most famous A-bomb survivors heard an American president call for the abolition of nukes.
“The only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act,” said Barack Obama in Prague. Mr Yamaguchi was elated. “I feel he is the only one we can now rely on to end these terrible weapons.”
Mr Yamaguchi has more call for hope than most. In 1945, he was exposed to both US atom bombs that incinerated Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. Now 93, Japan’s only recognised double survivor has been dealing with the horrific consequences all his life. He lost his son and wife in the last four years, both to cancer. And with months to live himself, he is hoping that president Obama will visit his city before he too dies. “That would be very important to us, and to the world.”
Political pressure at home and tight scheduling during Mr Obama’s first visit to Japan on Friday and Saturday make the chances of a presidential trip to either city almost zero. Mr Obama arrives in Tokyo amid a growing firestorm over the relocation of a controversial US airbase in Japan’s southern island of Okinawa. He is still trying to get a handle on the country’s new Democrat government, which is withdrawing its support for the US war in Afghanistan and has hinted at more independence from Tokyo’s long-time Washington ally.
But the landmark Prague pledge and last month’s award of a Nobel Peace Prize to Mr Obama has energised the pacifist movement here, which for years feared it was losing the war against the spread of nuclear weapons. Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba called the speech a “clarion call” to the world.
“President Obama knows that we are the majority standing on a solid moral foundation,” said Mr Akiba who has coined the phrase “Obamajority” to illustrate his point.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki believe Mr Obama could be the first sitting US leader to see the devastation wrought by the bombs, despite the odds against it. President Gerald Ford probably came closest in 1974 when he was urged by his own advisers to deliver a speech on peace and reconciliation in Hiroshima, but the proposal was eventually overruled. George W Bush called it “an interesting idea” but predictably declined on his trips to Japan.
In the meantime, Mayors for Peace, a Nagasaki/Hiroshima global initiative campaigning for the elimination of nukes by 2020, claims to have signed up more than 3,000 cities worldwide, including London, Dublin and Cork.
“Whatever happens during the Obama visit, we want to keep pouring our efforts into building public support and preparing the environment for abolition,” Mr Akiba said this month.
Mr Obama is immensely popular in Japan.
Veteran campaigners have warned, however, that the road to a nuke-free world won’t be built by presidential speeches alone.
Three decades ago, US president Jimmy Carter also called for disarmament before backpeddling, peace activist Bruce Gagnon told a Hiroshima anti-nuclear conference in the summer. “When he ran for office he said ‘the arms race is a disgrace’. Then he built the biggest Trident nuclear submarine base in Georgia.”
The two US bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 1945, killed an estimated 222,000 people. Both cities have watched with alarm post 9/11 US plans to weaponise space and develop “useable” nuclear weapons. After the Prague speech, Mr Yamaguchi wrote to the US president, offering his support and urging an end what he calls the “weaponisation of cruelty”.
“I asked him to carry on as president if four years are not enough to push the world in the right direction,” he recalls.
“Whatever happens, I’m just happy to have heard such comments from an American president before I die.”