Barack Obama pays his respects in Hiroshima

BARACK OBAMA drove through appreciative crowds along the approach to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, and on his departure an hour and a half later they surged into the park to where he had offered a wreath before its cenotaph. Mr Obama first visited the museum that serves as a reminder of the appalling human cost of the bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th 1945. He then met some of the elderly hibakusha, the dwindling number of Japanese who had been in the city on that fateful day but who had survived the blast. As schoolchildren on bicycles, young parents and elderly rushed in to savour the atmosphere, a sombre mood gave way to something approaching good cheer.

Beyond Hiroshima, very many Japanese welcomed Mr Obama’s visit, even though it came with no formal apology for the bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and, three days later, in Nagasaki. The two attacks and the radiation that followed killed over 200,000 people, mainly civilians. The bombings might seem to bear the hallmarks of a crime against humanity. But Americans have long argued that they hastened to a close a long, terrible war in the Pacific in which Japan was the clear aggressor. In Hiroshima, Japanese seemed to accept the absence of an American apology, though one hibakusha, Sumiaki Kadomoto, said that he hoped the president would silently be seeking forgiveness.

Given the moral and emotional complexity, the American president was his sonorous self in his speech at Ground Zero. “Seventy-one years ago on a bright, cloudless morning,” he said, “death fell from the sky and the world was changed.” The speech ranged widely, from the human history of violence to the suffering of all of the second world war’s victims. He said that technology as appalling as nuclear arms demanded a "moral revolution". He called for the destruction of the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons (the vast majority of which are still held by Russia and America).

Mr Obama acknowledged historical nuances, too. Thousands of Koreans and a smaller number of Chinese died in the blasts; they had been brought to southern Japan and coerced into working for the all-consuming war effort. And one of the survivors whom the president hugged, Shigeaki Mori, has long campaigned for 12 American prisoners of war who were killed to be commemorated.

By Mr Obama’s side at almost every step was Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Members of his right-wing Liberal Democratic Party used not to like the idea of an American president visiting Hiroshima. They thought it would give succour to peaceniks and other awkward types opposed not only to Japan’s nuclear-power plants but even to its security alliance with America. Many on the left, too, believe that the museum and Hiroshima memorials too narrowly emphasise Japan’s victimhood without properly acknowledging the suffering Japan wrought across Asia. Mr Abe and his like think that Japan has done far too much apologising already. But with China growing assertive in Asia, strong Japanese ties with America count for much, and for Mr Abe, accompanying Mr Obama to Hiroshima is one way to reinforce them. And later this year Mr Abe may pay his respects to those American servicemen killed in Japan’s infamous surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 that brought America into the war.

It will all, says Yoichi Funabashi, a public intellectual in Japan, help the long process of reconciliation between Japanese and Americans. Time also helps. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the atomic strikes, veterans of the second world war and members of Congress sharply criticised a planned exhibition and events at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, accusing curators of presenting Japan as a victim of American aggression. In the end, the exhibition was limited to the display of a section of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and embodiment of a glorious day for the armed forces and for American know-how and might. Twenty-one years on, there are fewer veterans, while Americans are more ambivalent about the bombings—when they think about them at all.

Yet, for all the lofty calls for a nuclear-free world left echoing around Hiroshima, there was an unwelcome ghost at the edge of the ceremonies: Kim Jong Un, young dictator of the rogue North Korean state, who not 500 miles (800 kilometres) from Hiroshima is urging his generals and engineers to develop a nuclear capability that may be very close to fruition. America is not going to give up its nuclear umbrella anytime soon, and Japan will, while not advertising the fact, be happy to shelter under it.