Embracing Different Truth

Planned few-minute comment turned into a seventy-minute speech. In the first visit of incumbent President of the United States to Hiroshima, Barack Obama urged the people to seek the world without nuclear weapons. Japanese newspapers raised his words, “we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them,” for headline of front page on Saturday. The atomic bomb sufferers calmly listened to his words, which was based on fundamentally different idea.

At the beginning of the speech, Obama looked pretending to be a poet. “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself,” Obama described the morning as if he had seen that. Then he asked, “Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?”

Then he turned to be a history teller. “The World War that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful if nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet, the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes; an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints. In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die – men, women, children no different than us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death,” told Obama, generalizing damages of war.

Obama raised some elements that would blind us to a “truth:” ability of human sometimes lead to unmatched destruction. He says material advancement or social innovation blinds mankind to the truth, higher cause justifies violence, no religion spares from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill, nations uses their story of binding to oppress and dehumanize those who are different, and scientific discoveries can be turned into ever-more efficient killing machines. Obama told that Hiroshima would teach this truth.

The sufferers of atomic bombs do not think that way. They do not think higher cause, religion, nations, science or technology kills people. For them, what kills you is war. They require more a world without war than a world without nuclear weapons. Before claiming a world without nuclear weapons, he had to discard war as means of settling international disputes. Demanding braveness to achieve a world without nuclear weapons, Obama was brave enough to make that speech wearing ecstatic countenance in front of hibakushas.

Keeping his hand shaking with POTUS, a 91-year-old hibakusha, Sunao Tsuboi, told Obama after the speech, “It’s important hereafter. After your stepping down as President next January, come to Hiroshima and look at and listen to it.” Is Obama further brave to do that?