A group called The Society for the Dissemination of Historical Facts in Japan, is insisting that the United States National Park Service call the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "war crimes" at the recently established Manhattan Project National Historic Parks.
Let me be clear, the society is a fringe group within Japan, but their demands got widespread coverage in Japan. The United States edition of Newsweek covered the story.
There are many issues swirling around the bombings. The United States National Park Service needs to make a decision about how to construct a narrative that reflects the American perspective. It appears the park service believes it should include the Japanese experience into the national park experience in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
According to The South China Morning News:
The facilities are being expanded and “interpretative themes” are being developed, said Kris Kirby, superintendent of the park.
Kirby confirmed that her department had received expressions of concern that the parks would be “a celebration of the bombs”.
“These facilities are not going to be a celebration but a respectful commemoration of history”, she said.
“There are many opinions to be taken into account, this is a controversial issue and so we are going to proceed very carefully”.
“What we want to do is to make sure that we provide multiple and broad perspectives and not draw firm conclusions, but to leave those conclusions to our visitors, giving them sovereignty of thought.”
And that is a serious concern to Hiromichi Moteki, acting head of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact in Japan and a former high school history teacher.
Moteki has previously described the plan for a national park to mark the attacks as “very strange” and insists that they be remembered as war crimes.
“I think there will be problems as they move forward with the project because the officially held view in the US government, as well as the opinion commonly held by American people, is that these were righteous actions,” he said.
Reasonable people can disagree, but the Unites States National Park Service is under no obligation morally or historically to offer the Japanese perspective.