Obama departs on trip to Vietnam, Japan

Barack Obama departed Saturday on a trip to Vietnam and Japan that will include the first visit to Hiroshima, site of the world's first nuclear attack, by a sitting US president.

The president's tenth trip to Asia aims in part to close painful chapters on two 20th century wars in a region he sees as vital to America's future.

It begins in Hanoi, where Obama will stress improving relations with a dynamic and rapidly emerging country, but one which, for most Americans, remains a by-word for slaughter and folly.

A major talking point will be the lifting of a US arms embargo, a last vestige of a war that ended in 1975.

He will meet the president, prime minister, leader of the national assembly and the country's de facto leader Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of the Communist Party.

Obama is likely to address the issue of political freedoms when he delivers a speech in Hanoi, but he will also make the case for a trans-Pacific trade deal that faces an uncertain future.

Obama will also travel to Vietnam's economic hub Ho Chi Minh City, the former capital of South Vietnam, to highlight the country's growing commercial clout.

In Japan, Obama will attend a G7 summit and make history by becoming the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, where in 1945 then-president Harry Truman dropped the world's first atomic bomb.

Victims of the bombings have called for an apology, which the White House says it is not willing to give.

Obama "believes it's important to acknowledge history, it's important to look squarely at history, it's important to have a dialogue about history," said close Obama foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes.

- AFP