Ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Hiroshima on Friday, the question of whether he will take the opportunity to chat with aging hibakusha during a tour of the memorial park near ground zero is in focus.
Obama will fly to Hiroshima after attending the two-day summit of the Group of Seven industrialized nations in Mie Prefecture to wrap up an Asian tour that also took him to Vietnam.
At Peace Memorial Park, Obama plans to deliver brief remarks after offering a wreath at the arch-shaped cenotaph as the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city devastated by an American atomic bomb near the end of World War II.