President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima, site of the first use of a nuclear bomb in warfare more than seven decades ago. He did not apologize for his nation’s act – which led to the deaths of an estimated 140,000 people – but made a somber speech about the need for disarmament.
The souls of the people who died Hiroshima “speak to us,” Obama said, according to The Washington Post’s David Nakamura. “They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.”
Looking on from afar, though, media and officials in China weren’t particularly thrilled with Obama’s gesture.
A Thursday editorial in the state-run China Daily insisted, not unlike the insistent arguments of some American conservatives, that the “atomic bombings of Japan were of its own making.”
The decision by then-President Harry Truman to deploy this terrifying weapon was, according to the China Daily, “a bid to bring an early end to the war and prevent protracted warfare from claiming even more lives.”
The editorial reminded all that Japan’s imperialist regime had brought on the onslaught after a decade of expansionist war and brutal occupation elsewhere in Asia.
“It was the war of aggression the Japanese militarist government launched against its neighbors and its refusal to accept its failure that had led to U.S. dropping the atomic bombs,” it concluded.
China’s foreign minister Wang Yi also pointed to the massacres and atrocities carried out by Japanese forces, including the 1937 ravaging of Nanjing, when over a period of days, some 300,000 people died in an orgy of rape and slaughter.
“Hiroshima is worthy of attention. But even more so Nanjing should not be forgotten,” the Chinese foreign ministry’s website quoted him as saying.
To this day, governments in Beijing and Seoul both complain about Japan’s perceived failures to fully atone for and properly remember the violence unleashed by its military.
“Victims deserve sympathy, but perpetrators should never shirk their responsibility,” Wang said.
The Chinese rhetoric was similar to what was aired in April following U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s own visit to Hiroshima.
An editorial in state-run Xinhua news agency said “it is Tokyo’s lasting moral obligation to let that notorious chapter known by every citizen of the country and make compensations and apologies fair and square to the affected individuals and facilities, not just in Japan but also in other stricken nations.”
