The site, which President Obama will visit on May 27, reflected the almost universal that the city was the victim of unnecessary brutality Japanese perspective: parents of children cremated, thousands of killed and a generation poisoned by radiation.
However, museum exhibitions around kept a stony silence about what had led to such horror. Japanese war machine that swept Asia during a decade before that morning that changed the history of the twentieth century.
For Americans who belong to the generation of World War II, as well as many of their children, Hiroshima is in the middle of a very different narrative. They believe that the decision of President Harry S. Truman to drop the bomb saved tens of thousands of American lives that have been lost in the invasion of Honshu, the main island of Japan. We ask some surviving veterans of this generation -a those who fought to break through from Iwo Jima to Okinawa and knew what they expected- them and no regrets about the decision of Truman nor moral equivalent between a Japanese campaign that killed more than 20 million in Asia and the horror of the bomb that destroyed everything.
In deciding to give a speech under the famous dome, Obama is taking a step that 11 of his predecessors avoided. By the mere fact present in Hiroshima, you will have no choice but to walk through a minefield of conflicting memories, both in Japan and in the United States field.
The two drastically different interpretations of what happened have always pulled-sometimes implicitly so strong alliance between the US and Japan that emerged from the ashes. Even today, with some notable dissidents in both countries, these interpretations remain as frozen in history as the shadow that was printed on the stairs of a bank building near ground zero of Hiroshima, created by the body of the poor soul sitting there when the explosion occurred.
The White House insisted Tuesday that Obama will not apologize in Hiroshima. It will not criticize Truman's decision to drop the bomb or by the call even more questionable to launch a second warhead on Nagasaki three days later because the emperor had not yet surrendered.
"This visit will provide an opportunity to honor the memory of all the innocent people who were lost during the war," wrote Benjamin J. Rhodes on Tuesday, deputy national security adviser for Obama. For a president who came to their functions talking about a world without nuclear weapons, an idea whose realization has presented more problems than I had imagined, it is also an opportunity to say, in his last months as president, that the risk of a new Hiroshima has hardly disappeared.
This may also be the right time to save this historical gap time. Hiroshima has unleashed an important literature which began with the count unprecedented John Hersey in The New Yorker, published in 1946, when the city was still in ruins and some of the deepest moral debates of the twentieth century.
Currently, survivors of the morning, when the Enola Gay flew over the sky of the city and dropped their load, they are even harder to find than US veterans, now 90, who believe their lives were spared by this same act.
The most recent exhibitions in Hiroshima have reminded visitors that the city was not a random target: it was a bustling manufacturing center of Japanese war machine. "Some of us believe that when we reflect on the pump, we should also reflect on the war," said the mayor of Hiroshima in 1994 when we spoke while touring the new exhibition, whose opening the Japanese extreme right opposed.
Even today, 22 years later, the accounts sanitized war that a new generation of Japanese children are taught in school evade significantly rummaging in decision-making that led to the Pacific War, the slaughter of Nanjing or questions whether the "comfort women" (forced women into sexual slavery) were organized by the Japanese army. The liveliness of Hiroshima has fused with anodyne accounts that preceded it, this reinforces the feeling among Americans that, unlike Germany, Japan has never fully dealt with their past.
Many Japanese feel the same US. Remember that when the Smithsonian Museum organized the first exhibition of the Enola Gay bomber in 1995, commemorating the 50th anniversary, veterans so intensely opposed to efforts to conduct an impartial analysis of the decision to drop the bomb-and their consequences- that congress held hearings and museum director was forced to resign. The exhibition was diluted and now, when the famous B-29 is exposed in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center outside the Dulles- International Airport any discussion about the horrors of the launch of the pump is short and the story behind controversial.
"The most important military leaders of the United States who fought in World War II, to the surprise of those who do not know the documents on the subject were quite clear that the atomic bomb was unnecessary, that Japan was about to surrender and for many, the destruction of a large number of civilians was immoral, "he wrote in the weekly the Nation last year Gar Alperovitz, leader of the movement to review the account of the history of the United States.
From now until the day when Obama will visit the place, the big question will be how visions have evolved in both countries since 1995.
"I do not think there's been a lot of real evolution in Japan, at least not between the right wing and amnesic who deny the destructive war that Japan led Asia and insist they are victims," said Richard Samuels, a professor at the Instituto Tecnologico Massachusetts (MIT), who has written some of the most revealing work on the army of Japan and the cultures of pre and post-war surrounding it. "For them, Obama's visit will be an opportunity to reiterate that they are right."
Samuels said that predicting the reaction in the United States is more difficult. He added that in the midst of a presidential campaign "this will be a fertile target for those who argue that it is the next stop on the tour of apology from Obama."
However, even so, the questions revolve around those last months of the Pacific War in 1945 have only become stronger. The firebombing of Tokyo in March of that year caused nearly 100,000 deaths, according to some accounts. And many of those who questioned the decision to drop the atomic bomb have asked why was not exploited first in an uninhabited place to demonstrate the magnitude of the power of this new weapon.
However, the most important change may be due to the absence of witnesses, says Samuels. Twenty years ago, "the greatest generation, people who lived through the Second World War, still here."
Today, their number has been reduced to some few and soon the only ones who will discuss the legacy of Hiroshima have not had the need to drop the bomb or not to live the horror of its consequences.
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