“It’s a testament to how even the most painful divides can be bridged,” he said. “How two nations can become not just partners but the best of friends.”
But Obama also said that the two countries were “reaffirming one of the greatest alliances in the world”.
Sunao Tsuboi, 91, a Hiroshima survivor, told AFP that he had been invited to the event.
He earlier told public broadcaster NHK that if he has the chance to speak with Obama, he would “want to express my gratitude” for his visit.
“I have no intention of asking him for words of apology,” said Tsuboi, a long-time anti-nuclear campaigner.
Some quarters of Japanese society, however, have called for such a gesture, though Obama has ruled it out and insisted he will not revisit the decisions of his predecessor Harry Truman at the close of World War II.
While some in Japan feel the attack was a war crime because it targeted civilians, many Americans say it hastened the end of a brutal and bloody conflict, and ultimately saved lives.
The visit, while largely welcomed in Japan, has drawn less sympathetic reactions in other Northeast Asian countries where historical disputes with Tokyo over wartime and colonial aggression remain raw.
In a commentary released late Thursday, North Korea’s official KCNA news agency called Obama’s trek to Hiroshima an act of “childish political calculation” aimed at disguising the president’s true nature as a “nuclear war maniac”.
“Obama is seized with the wild ambition to dominate the world by dint of the US nuclear edge,” the agency said.
And in Beijing, the government-published China Daily newspaper ran a headline saying: “Atomic bombings of Japan were of its own making.”
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