U.S. President Joe Biden is not expected to visit Nagasaki when he travels to Japan for a Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima in May due to scheduling conflicts, diplomatic sources said Thursday, disappointing citizens who hoped for his trip to the atomic bomb-hit city.
Biden would have been the first sitting U.S. president to visit the southwestern Japan city, which the United States hit with an atomic bomb after dropping one on Hiroshima in August 1945 in the final days of World War II.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida hoped he and Biden could send a message to the world from the two atomic-bombed Japanese cities toward a world free of nuclear weapons, with concern growing over whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will use such destructive arms in his country's war against Ukraine, the sources said
Japan, meanwhile, has continued to arrange a visit by the G-7 leaders, including Biden, to the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima, the sources said. If realized, it would be the first time that the G-7 heads have stopped by the museum together.
In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, in western Japan, on the occasion of the previous G-7 summit in Japan. Biden was vice president in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2017.
Kishida, who has put forward his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons since taking office in October 2021, was eager to accompany Biden on his visit to Nagasaki, the sources said.
But a Japanese government source said it is difficult to adjust Biden's itinerary to visit Nagasaki, while a U.S. diplomatic source said his envisioned trip to the city would not come true.
The G-7 summit, slated to be held for three days from May 19, will be hosted by Kishida, who represents a constituency in Hiroshima Prefecture.
In February, Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue met with U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and requested that Biden visit the city.
Shigemitsu Tanaka, the 82-year-old head of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council, said, "As the president of a nation that developed and used nuclear weapons, I wanted (Biden) to know the reality of the atomic bombing" in the city.
As Russia has invaded Ukraine since February 2022, Tanaka added Biden should have decided to visit Nagasaki "with Russia's threat of nuclear use increasing."
When Obama made a trip to Hiroshima, Kishida, then foreign minister, met with him along with then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was fatally shot during an election campaign speech in July 2022.
Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his attempts to free the world of nuclear weapons.
In Hiroshima, Obama delivered a speech and met with representatives of atomic bomb survivors, called hibakusha in Japanese, at the city's Peace Memorial Park.
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