U.S. scholar Emanuel Pastreich took at face value the textbooks claiming that the United States had no choice but to drop atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II and save lives that he read in high school.

After years of research, and visits to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the expert on East Asian diplomacy is now convinced that the United States owes an apology to Japan for the bombings and must also eliminate its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Pastreich, president of the think tank Asia Institute, highlighted these issues during his short-lived bid to run as a candidate from the Green Party in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

“Some people may think my apology was too extreme and others may think it was a brave act,” Pastreich, 59, said in a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun. “I do not think it was either. I was merely doing my duty as a U.S. presidential candidate.”

Excerpts from the interview follow:

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I expressed my formal apology in a speech I delivered on Aug. 6, the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

“As an American, I offer my deep apologies to the Japanese people for this bombing,” I said in the speech, which was later broadcast on YouTube.

I also stated unambiguously, “The atomic bombings were not necessary.”

In my declaration of candidacy for the 2024 U.S. presidential nomination from the Green Party, I made a public promise that “America will get rid of all its nuclear weapons within 10 years.”

Unfortunately, I was unable to gain the necessary support to continue the campaign for the nomination from the Green Party and withdrew at the end of September.

The mainstream American media has not covered my comments or speeches from that period.

Even so, as an American who aspires to become U.S. president, I wanted to apologize for the atomic bombings and to make a public promise that the United States will stop the development and deployment of nuclear weapons.

I was born in the United States and educated in the United States.

The history books I read in high school taught me that “in order to end the war quickly and save lives, we had no choice but to drop the atomic bomb.”

My teachers said the same thing, and so I did not think deeply about the matter at the time.

When I studied in Taiwan (in 1985) for my junior year of college, I encountered the Japanese culture that had been left behind from the colonial period and I was inspired to study about Japan seriously.

After I graduated from Yale, I came to Japan, studied the Japanese language, and then entered the graduate program at the University of Tokyo.

My major was Japanese literature, but I read broadly in modern Japanese history as well.

Those readings gave me insights into what the United States had done in Asia.

I started to have doubts about what Americans did from World War II, to the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and I asked myself why we continued to expand militarily.

I first visited Nagasaki in 1991. The visit was related to my graduate research on how Chinese culture was imported into Japan through the port of Nagasaki in the 19th century.

I visited the site of the foreign settlement Dejima and Chinatown.

I also stopped by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

That was my first exposure to images of the apocalyptic ruins of Nagasaki and the burned bodies of innocent civilians.

That experience made me realize that the United States is a country capable of doing terrible things like this.

It was clear that dropping the atomic bombs had been a mistake and that it was wrong for the United States to keep nuclear weapons today.

When I had occasion later to visit Hiroshima, those thoughts became only the stronger.

In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. U.S. President Joe Biden also visited the city when he attended the Group of Seven summit there in May.

But neither of them apologized for the dropping of the atomic bombs in spite of overwhelming evidence of the criminality of the act.

Many people in the United States perhaps think it is natural that their government takes such a position about the dropping of the atomic bombs, but I do not.

Some people may think my apology was too extreme and others may think it was a brave act.

I do not think it was either. I was merely doing my duty as a U.S. presidential candidate.

It was an apology that meant that we Americans must understand Japan and must not forget the sufferings of the victims of those bombings.

It was an apology meant to keep Americans from accepting as normal that the United States, a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, has refused to adhere to its obligations.

I have not had the chance to meet with the victims of the atomic bombings or their families. I am sorry I did not make the effort earlier in my career.

I hope that one day I can make an apology in person for the atomic bombings.

I will continue to make public calls for the elimination of nuclear weapons in my capacity as an expert on international relations in East Asia.

(This article is based on an interview by Asako Hanafusa.)

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Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Emanuel Pastreich was educated in Chinese literature at Yale University.

He received a master's degree at the University of Tokyo in comparative culture in 1992 and a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University in 1997.

He taught Japanese studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and George Washington University. He is currently affiliated with Yale University's Council on East Asian Studies. 

Pastreich founded the Asia Institute in 2007 as a platform for global dialogue on contemporary issues.

He declared himself a U.S. presidential candidate as an independent in February 2020.

In August, he was recognized as a registered presidential candidate in the Green Party of the United States, but he had to withdraw after failing to raise sufficient funds.

Pastreich, currently residing in Japan, commutes between Tokyo, Washington and Seoul.