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US President Barack Obama speaks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington

Barack Obama’s decision to visit Hiroshima is understood to represent both his personal ideal of a world without nuclear weapons and geopolitical considerations including the US alliance with Japan. This can be seen as a coup for Japanese diplomats, who took advantage of the fact that this year’s G7 summit is being held in Japan.

In a press release on May 10, the White House said that the purpose of Obama’s visit was “to highlight his continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

In order to prevent the visit from being taken as an apology to Japan, White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said, “[Obama] will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. Instead, he will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future.”

Obama’s visit to Hiroshima was inspired by his promise to build a “world without nuclear weapons” and was eagerly promoted by Japan, which has been playing up the suffering caused by the nuclear bombings in order to draw attention away from its status as the aggressor in World War II.

When he first visited Japan in Nov. 2009, Obama said that he would be honored if he could visit Hiroshima during his presidency and that it would be very meaningful to him, but he did not visit the city on that trip.

According to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, then Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka told US Ambassador John Roos that the time was not right for a visit to Hiroshima. There were serious concerns that Obama’s visit would be seen as an apology for the US dropping the bomb.

During the seven years since then, there have been major changes in US-Japan relations. The controversy about relocating the Futenma military base on Okinawa that raged while Prime Minister Yukio Yatoyama of the Democratic Party of Japan was in power has since blown over, and the US-Japan alliance had been upgraded into a global alliance to check the rising power of China. This has enabled Japan not only to exercise the right of collective self-defense on behalf of the US but also to deploy forces anywhere in the world to provide logistical support on US bidding.

Taking these changes into account, US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Hiroshima on Apr. 11, and when little criticism was voiced about his visit, Obama at last made his decision. Two figures who played a large role in this decision were John Kerry and US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, who was in favor from the very beginning, Kyodo News reported.

The Japanese government has eagerly asked leaders from around the world to visit the site of the nuclear blast, with Shinzo Abe expressing his hope that they would learn the reality of surviving a nuclear attack. The Japanese government had been waiting for Obama’s decision given its belief that a visit by a sitting US president would have a “big impact,” as a Japanese government official put it to Kyodo News.

Both Abe and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida have tiptoed around American feelings by deliberately avoiding the word “apology.”

While this visit is the result of the interplay of the Obama administration‘s nuclear policy and the Abe administration’s historical revisionism, it is expected to be remembered as a historic event at which the renovation of the US-Japan alliance is brought to completion.

On May 11, Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun cited a Japanese government official who said that, because of this decision, there is talk about Abe visiting Pearl Harbor around the time of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Peru this November. If Obama’s visit to Hiroshima and Abe’s visit to Pearl Harbor both go ahead, the US and Japan will be able to relinquish the lingering resentment that they harbor against each other because of their strained past.

Even the New York Times said that this visit “could serve as a coda to the transformation in the relationship between Japan and the United States from wartime enemies to the closest of allies.”

Since the US began its rebalance to Asia in 2009, it has achieved some intermediary results with the revision of the Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation and Abe‘s address before a joint session of US Congress in Apr. 2015, but Obama’s visit to Hiroshima appears to be the grand finale.

While US media are not opposed to Obama‘s visit, this is why they also think that Japan will probably regard the visit as an apology. Obama is not scheduled to meet victims of the nuclear attack, but there could always be a surprise encounter.

“I hope that he [Obama] will listen to even a little of the testimony of the survivors,” Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Yoshiko Kajimoto, 85, said in an interview with Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun.

The New York Times and other major US newspapers have focused on how Obama’s nuclear policy is behind this visit while hardly mentioning how the visit will affect East Asia.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

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