HIROSHIMA, Japan — The patter of rain had subsided on a gray Friday morning as President Joe Biden and other Group of 7 leaders arrived at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the first of two sites where American planes dropped atomic bombs in August 1945, laying waste to two Japanese cities and bringing an end to World War II.
Tanaka Satoshi, a 79-year-old “hibakusha,” or survivor of the atomic bombings, watched closely on television. Biden, the leader of the country that carried out the world’s first nuclear attack, stood in front of the Cenotaph, a memorial shaped to resemble a Japanese dwelling. The arched monument is designed to metaphorically shelter the estimated 140,000 people who perished in the Hiroshima blast or died from the resulting fires and radiation.
After Biden and his foreign counterparts placed wreaths of white flowers at the foot of the memorial, Hiroshima Mayor Matsui Kazumi explained the carefully worded inscription: “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.” The leaders listened, staring in the distance at the skeletal ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the only structure left standing inside the blast zone.
