Survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima have reacted angrily to an agreement that links the city’s peace park with a memorial in Pearl Harbor.
The sister-park agreement, signed this week by US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, is designed to promote peace and friendship between the former Pacific war enemies.
“Nobody can go to Pearl Harbor, and nobody can go to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and enter the front door, walk out the exit door and be the same person,” Emanuel said at a signing ceremony at the US embassy in Tokyo.
“I think the hope here is that we inspire people from all over the United States and all over Japan to visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial and to visit Pearl Harbor so they can learn the spirit of reconciliation,” he said.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Pearl Harbor National Memorial in Hawaii would promote exchanges and share experiences of restoring historic structures and landscapes, as well as in educating young people and tourism, media reports said.
“The sister arrangement between the two parks related to the beginning and end of the war will be a proof that mankind, despite making the mistake of waging a war, can come to its senses, reconcile and pursue peace,” Matsui said.
However, representatives of hibakusha — survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — condemned the agreement as inappropriate, saying that while the Pearl Harbor attack targeted a naval base, the bombing of Hiroshima indiscriminately killed large numbers of civilians.
Haruko Moritaki, an A-bomb victim and adviser to the Hiroshima Association for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, said the agreement was an “insult” to survivors.
“The historical backgrounds of the two parks will forever be different,” she told the Chugoku Shimbun.
Several groups wrote to the Hiroshima city government asking Matsui not to sign the agreement, saying that the two wartime attacks were “not something we should forgive each other for,” the Nikkei Asia reported.
“They are historic lessons to learn from and never repeat,” they said.
Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-bomb Sufferers Organization chairman Kunihiko Sakuma said that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had been unnecessary.
“It did not end the war and save the lives of American soldiers, as the US claims,” he told the Nikkei. “It was clear that Japan was going to lose. Unless that fundamental issue is addressed, we can’t just focus on the future.”
More than 2,300 US service personnel were killed in Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, bringing the US into the Pacific war.
About 80,000 people died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, with the death toll rising to 140,000 by the end of the year.
Another 70,000 people died in Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, six days before Japan surrendered.
Emanuel said he was aware of the objections raised by hibakusha groups.
“I understand anguish and angst is an emotion, but I don’t think you should be trapped by that,” he said, adding that reconciliation between the US and Japan “is the example of what I think this world desperately needs right now.”
The two sites have been associated with reconciliation since Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, in May 2016. Then-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe made a reciprocal visit to Pearl Harbor in December the same year.
In a statement to mark the sister-park agreement, Obama said his and Abe’s visits had been the “key steps in deepening the alliance between our two nations,” and described the Hiroshima-Pearl Harbor agreement as “another historic accomplishment.”
“By connecting our two peoples to our shared past, we can build a shared future grounded in peace and cooperation,” Obama said.
Shigeru Mori, a hibakusha who met Obama in Hiroshima, said he welcomed the agreement.
“Pearl Harbor is a painful place for Americans to remember the war,” the Chugoku Shimbun quoted him as saying. “I want Japan and the US to join hands and do their best to work for peace.”
Additional reporting by AP
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS