Barack Obama on Friday became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, laying a wreath at the site of the world's first atomic bombing in a gesture Tokyo and Washington hope will showcase their alliance and invigorate efforts to eradicate nuclear weapons.
"We come to ponder the terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past," Obama said after laying a wreath at a peace memorial. "We come to mourn the dead."
"We remember all the innocents killed in the arc of that terrible war," a solemn Obama said.
"We have a shared responsibility to look directly in the eye of history. We must ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again."
Before laying the wreath at the memorial, Obama visited a museum where haunting displays include photographs of badly burned victims, the tattered and stained clothes they wore and statues depicting them with flesh melting from their limbs.
The two governments hope Obama's tour of Hiroshima, where an atomic bomb killed thousands instantly on Aug. 6, 1945, and some 140,000 by the year's end, underscores a new level of reconciliation and tighter ties between the former enemies.
Aides had said Obama's main goal in Hiroshima was to showcase his nuclear disarmament agenda, for which he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Obama said earlier he would honor all who died in World War II but would not apologize for the bombing. The city of Nagasaki was hit by a second nuclear bomb on Aug. 9, 1945, and Japan surrendered six days later.
