Calling It Absolute Evil

Hiroshima commemorated the seventy-first anniversary of the first human suffering from nuclear bomb. Mayor of Hiroshima blamed the dropping of an atomic bomb, calling it “absolute evil.” While Japanese Prime Minister asked the world effort not to repeat that tragedy, people in Hiroshima rather expected determined effort of President of United States to achieve the world without nuclear weapon.

As a business as usual, Mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, delivered Hiroshima Peace Declaration in the ceremony held at the Peace Memorial Park in Saturday morning. “On 8:15 a.m. of August 6^th, 1945, ripping the clearest blue sky, an absolute evil that human being had never experienced was released and burnt down the city in a moment,” Matsui started reading out the declaration.

Matsui introduced an inconvenient fact that over fifteen thousands of nuclear warheads are still remaining in the world. “When we face that fact, we must receive an appeal of a man who expressed it living hell that ‘future human being in the world has to cooperate each other to live their peaceful and happy lives with dignity of life,’ or a claim of a bloody woman that ‘To live out our given days, next generation has to cry out that no nuclear weapon is needed,’ and begin to take action,” said Matsui.

Matsui then quoted a sentence of Obama’s Hiroshima speech as the first incumbent U.S. President being in the city, which was “among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.” He praised it as showing passion to accept the cry of nuclear sufferers, or hibakusha, not to experience that devastation again and to stand for eliminating existing nuclear weapons. Matsui also expected Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to exercise leadership with Obama.

Following Matsui, Abe made his speech, promising his effort to achieve permanent peace of the world. “As an only nuclear suffered nation in war, we maintain three non-nuclear principles and the regime of Non-proliferation Treaty,” told Abe. However, the three principles were degraded to two and a half principles, allowing U.S. force to introduce nuclear weapons in Japan.

With hope of implementation of Hiroshima Speech, Japanese media reported Obama’s consideration of making proposal for nuclear test ban in United Nations Security Council. To be successful in that legacy making, Obama has to persuade U.S. Congress to ratify Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in his lame duck phase in his presidency. It is further difficult to achieve broad consensus in U.N. Against the hope of Hiroshima, world without nuclear weapon is still far from the goal.