US President Biden unlikely to visit Nagasaki during Japan trip for G7: Report
US President Joe Biden.
United States President Joe Biden is unlikely to visit Nagasaki during his trip to Japan for a Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima in May due to scheduling conflicts. According to a report by the Kyodo News agency on Thursday (April 6), Biden would have been the first sitting American president to have visited the southwestern Japanese city, which the US hit with an atomic bomb after dropping one on Hiroshima in August 1945 in the final days of World War II.
Sources told Kyodo News that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida hoped he and Biden could send a message to the world from Hiroshima and Nagasaki towards a world free of nuclear weapons, with concerns growing over whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will use such destructive arms in his country's war against Ukraine.
Prime Minister Kishida, who 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 added. However, a Japanese government source told the news agency that it was difficult to adjust the US President's itinerary to visit Nagasaki.
Shigemitsu Tanaka, the head of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council said that as president of a "country that developed and used nuclear weapons, I wanted (Biden) to know the reality of the atomic bombing" in the city."
With Russia's ongoing offensive in Ukraine, Tanaka added that Biden should have decided to visit Nagasaki with Moscow's threat of nuclear use increasing.
Back in 2016, then-US president Barack Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima on the occasion of the previous G-7 summit in Japan. Kishida, who was Japan's then foreign minister, along with then prime minister Shinzo Abe.
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On March 21, Japanese PM Kishida met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Kishida had been the only leader of the G7 countries who had not visited war-torn Ukraine.
Zelensky said in a joint news conference with Kishida that he would join an upcoming G7 summit in Japan via an online link following an invitation from the Japanese prime minister.
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