In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” President Barack Obama invites us to share his longing to visit Kenya, his African father’s birth place.

I doubt if he has a similar strong longing to visit Hiroshima, my grandfather’s birth place. He’s going there because it plays a unique role in American history — and in the global mind. It’s where the United States gave birth to the nuclear age, committing an atrocity in the process.

No doubt, bad things occurred in Kenya. When I was a third-grader at Palolo Elementary School, the teacher asked if we knew what was the worst word in the English language. We didn’t, so she told us: colonialism.

On Aug. 6, 1945, something unspeakable occurred in Hiroshima. Obama has a nifty euphemism for it: “a flash of light.” He used the euphemism in his 2009 Prague speech, talking about the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

In an op-ed in The New York Times, Issey Miyake, the Japanese fashion designer, said he can still see the flash. It was his home town, Hiroshima, that got vaporized when he was 7 years old.

There were news reports that a former American POW would join Obama in Hiroshima. The White House subsequently said that no invitation was made to Daniel Crowley, a survivor of the Bataan Death March.

Complicating the symbolism of Obama’s visit to Hiroshima with a victim of Japanese brutality and barbarism would have sent a mixed message. In fact, it would have been tasteless.

“Tasteless” is what British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond called Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent stunt in Syria. Putin had arranged for a leading Russian orchestra, conducted by a celebrity Russian conductor, to play Bach amid the ruins of the city of Palmyra.

The concert was a reminder that Russian culture and civilization was pitted against ISIS brutality and barbarism.

It was also meant to divert attention from Putin’s support of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s brutal dictator.

Increasingly, as weapons of mass destruction become more deadly, global battles are fought with symbols.

In our quest for symbolic resolution, we need to be honest. If Obama’s visit to Hiroshima is an apology of a kind, then a similar apology of a kind is required of the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

He needs to come to Hawaii and set foot on the USS Arizona Memorial.

Gestural politics is fine, but sincere, full-throated apologies are even better. Our country needs to offer a clear apology for the madness of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Similarly, Japan must apologize for its wartime atrocities.

Americans of Japanese ancestry deserve an apology. The Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor overturned the lives of Japanese immigrants (issei) and their American children (nisei).

When the attack occurred, members of both groups, unless they had renounced their Japanese citizenship, were subjects of the Japanese emperor, with the nisei holding dual citizenship. Because Japan went mad, their loyalty to the United States was called into question.

To establish trust between the people of Japan and Americans of Japanese ancestry, the Japanese emperor — the symbolic head of Japan — should come to Honolulu and offer a heart-felt apology for the suffering endured by the issei and nisei following the Pearl Harbor attack.