Ahem.... Dick Cheney says that obama was going to go to Hiroshima when he was on his world apology tour in 2009 and apologize for the United States dropping the atomic bomb... you know to END the war!
The Japanese Prime Minister turned obama down.
In 2009 there were two Prime Ministers: first Taro Aso, who was deposed by Yukio Hatoyama. When that election occurred, I wrote the following to students who were taking a basic philosophy course from me, which I think y'all would find interesting, because it shows how little things have changed in Japan politically since before, during, and after the war...
"Let's assume, for the sake of the argument, that you have heard about the election: how for the first time since I was in diapers, the Japanese have kicked out their ruling Liberal Democratic Party--perhaps the most misnamed political party in the world today, since it is neither politically liberal nor anything like the Democratic Party in this country--and replaced it with the Democratic Party of Japan, which is actually like the Democratic Party in this country. In some ways, this is in fact a sea change, and Japanese domestic and foreign policies are likely to change over the next few years as a result.
"But underlying the change is a complete lack of change, if one takes the much longer view of Japanese society that a Confucian would, going back at least 100 years and perhaps more. Yukio Hatoyama of the DPJ, who is going to be the next Prime Minister, will take over from Taro Aso of the LDP, who has been the Prime Minister. In terms of policies, there are quite a few differences between the two men, and the parties they have controlled. Don't let the differences fool you, however. What do Taro Aso and Yukio Hatoyama have in common, besides being Japanese? First, I'll let Wikipedia tell about Taro Aso:
"His father, Takakichi Aso, was the chairman of the Aso Cement Company and a close associate of Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka; his mother Kazuko Aso was Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida's daughter. Taro is also a great-great-grandson of Toshimichi Okubo [the Japanese leader who first hired then fought Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai - Dr M], and his current wife, Chikako is the third daughter of Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki. His younger sister, Nobuko, is the wife of Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, a first cousin of the Emperor Akihito."
"Now, Globalpost on Yukio Hatoyama:
"Hatoyama's great-grandfather was the speaker of the Japanese parliament [under the Emperor Meiji, who shows up at the end of The Last Samurai], his grandfather, Ichiro Hatoyama, was prime minister, his father foreign minister, and his younger brother, Kunio, is currently a government minister in the cabinet [with Taro Aso, meaning he is about to be out of a job: imagine Jeb Bush having been Attorney General in the Clinton Administration while his brother George Bush ran for President, and you get the idea]. Just for good measure, his other grandfather was the founder of the tire giant Bridgestone."
"Get the picture? The Japanese were choosing between someone whose family has been in national politics since the last samurai era of the 1800s, and someone whose family has been in national politics...since the last samurai era of the 1800s. That's as Confucian as a democratic election gets.
"P.S. Incidentally, Aso is a Catholic, which in Japan would be a little like Bush being a Buddhist, while Hatoyama is called "the alien" because of his new age neologisms such as having as his campaign slogan, "Love and Friendship." By the same token, Ichiro Hatoyama, the grandfather of Yukio Hatoyama, who defeated Shigeru Yoshida the grandfather of Taro Aso for Prime Minister in the 1950s (the last time the LDP was out of power and when I was in diapers), was a Baptist and a Freemason, and there is a picture running around the internet that supposedly shows Yukio-san giving a Masonic handshake to someone."