When leaders attending the G7 summit in Japan were invited to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the officer accompanying US President Joe Biden carrying the so-called nuclear briefcase caught people’s attention.
A slogan is pictured at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in a protest against the upcoming Group of Seven (G7) summit, in Hiroshima, Japan, May 17, 2023. (Photo: Xinhua)
Although the briefcase always accompanies a US president on visits both at home and abroad, and it has appeared in Hiroshima before, very few noticed it. But this time, with the rising volatility in the world, fears of a nuclear war have been heightened and people are very alert to the possibility that the unthinkable might be thinkable to someone.
No one knows whether the host took the nuclear briefcase into consideration while arranging the visit, but the worldwide attention to that details people’s anxieties about the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being repeated elsewhere.
Yet it is wrong for Japanese politicians to mix the cause with the result and portray imperialistic Japan as a “victim” of World War II. While telling the world how Japanese people suffered from the nuclear attacks by the United States, it is equally important to remind everybody that it was imperialist Japan’s ambitions and moves that led to the tragedies.
The Japanese government has been trying to cover up the country’s history of aggression by seeking an apology for the nuclear attacks in a bid to portray the country a victim in the war. But although the Japanese people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered from the dropping of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”, it was the country’s imperialist ambitions that were the root cause of their sufferings.
The White House made clear before the summit that President Joe Biden would not offer an apology for the United States’ use of nuclear weapons against Japan.
Now, 78 years after the end of WWII, militarism is once again on the rise in Japan and there are constant attempts to revise the nation’s so-called pacifist Constitution.
The Japanese people should know better than anyone the horrors of nuclear weapons, but it seems the Japanese politicians have forgotten the lessons of history.
