Ex-Hiroshima mayor hopes Obama will listen to A-bomb survivors

TOKYO. KAZINFORM - A former Hiroshima mayor on Monday expressed his hope that U.S. President Barack Obama would listen to survivors' stories during his visit later this week to the western Japan city that was devastated by a U.S. atomic bomb in the late stages of World War II, Kyodo reports.

"What makes Hiroshima, Hiroshima are hibakusha. It is natural to meet with hibakusha, who are the face of Hiroshima," Tadatoshi Akiba told a press conference in Tokyo, using hibakusha, the Japanese word for victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.
Obama is scheduled to visit Hiroshima after attending the two-day Group of Seven summit in Mie Prefecture, central Japan, through Friday, making him the first sitting U.S. president to do so.
Akiba, who served as mayor of Hiroshima for 12 years through 2011, said Obama's landmark visit would pave the way for U.S. presidents in the future to follow suit, saying, "This is not the last."
Regarding the view that meeting with atomic bomb survivors could be construed as an apology for dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later, Akiba said, "If the whole meeting is broadcast, everyone will know whether it was an apology or not."
The 73-year-old former Hiroshima mayor says hibakusha simply want people in the United States to understand the reality of their suffering in the wake of the atomic bombings.
He said the elimination of nuclear weapons would be tantamount to an apology for victims, adding, "An apology without eradicating nuclear weapons can't be a true apology."
During his tenure, Akiba launched a campaign known as "Obamajority" to support the U.S. president's commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons after his high-profile speech in Prague in 2009.