Fashion's Issey Miyake Haunted by Hiroshima

Issey Miyake’s clothes are famous for color and exuberance, but the Japanese designer has a tragic past: He survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Miyake has declined to talk about the blast, “preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed,” he writes in the New York Times. But President Obama’s call for a world without nukes “awakened something buried deeply within me.”

Now, after the US and Russia signed an arms-reduction deal, Miyake would like Obama to visit Hiroshima, which commemorates the blast Aug. 6. The sight of an American president there, Miyake writes, “would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat.” (More Issey Miyake stories.)