Hiroshima

Kikue Takagi narrowly survived the atomic bomb that killed her classmates. Soon after she moved to California, where she worked for many years at Disneyland. Now in her 80s, she's back in Hiroshima.

President Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Japanese city since America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of 1945.

The White House hasn't announced any such plans. But Obama will be in Japan next month and a visit would be a grand symbolic gesture in keeping with his emphasis on nuclear nonproliferation.

Kerry is the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to visit the site. He honored the 140,000 Japanese who died in the U.S. attack on the city, but did not apologize for the bombing there and in Nagasaki.

The southern city was devastated three days after Hiroshima, in the closing act of World War II. At the ceremony, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe renewed his country's pledge to shun nuclear weapons.

The anniversary of the devastation wrought by the first military use of an atomic weapon comes as Japan's government is pushing an expanded role for its military.