Can China lead the world on reducing the threat of nuclear war?

Way back when, rather long ago, a youngish, greenish post-graduate student, obsessing about nuclear war, devoted his first book to it. “Doomsday,” I declaimed in Understanding Doomsday: A Guide to the Arms Race for Hawks, Doves and People, “the moment when all the energies of all the nuclear bombs are released over the heads of the inhabitants of the earth. Not a pleasant thought, and, to be sure, there’s nothing to be gained by dwelling on it; but a lot might be lost by ignoring it.”

No one in power should. In 2010, the far-sighted Ban Ki-moon, barely into his first term, pointedly chose to become the first UN secretary general to attend the annual peace memorial ceremony in Hiroshima. The fact that he was from Korea, with all its issues with Japan, didn’t stop him. It was a simple matter of conscience, he said. Now, in 2016, “leading” yet again from behind, President Barack Obama this week is to become the first active US president to visit the Hiroshima memorial. Better late than never…

For their demonstrations of remembrance and concern, we applaud both, while devoutly wishing that President Xi Jinping ( 習近平 ) would choose to do the same some day soon. It would be so impactful for the world to see China’s president free himself from the familiar chain of enmity with Japan by visiting Hiroshima. In all-out nuclear war, after all, China could lose more people than anyone.

Japan, once Asia’s No 1, will always have hanging in its closet the brutal ghost of having served as the first target of an atomic bombing: Will history record Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the last ones? The war-ending consequences of the A-bomb decisions by US president Harry S. Truman still reverberate. Among other things, politically, they include helping breed a populace that rates among the world’s most consistently pacifist; and, paradoxically, supporting a political and military elite that at times seems to suggest Japan was somehow innocent for what preceded its nuclear nightmare. But please do note sympathetically the patient endurance of the largely pacifist Japanese people with a political system (engineered by conquering America) that has produced too many moral dwarfs and politically deaf figures.

In his 2014 novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami might have been speaking for many Japanese with these words spoken by one of the characters: “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them ... If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.”