Tokyo: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor with President Obama later this month, becoming the first Japanese leader to visit the site of the attack on Hawaii 75 years ago.
The joint visit comes after Obama went to Hiroshima with Abe in August, becoming the first American leader to visit the site where the US dropped an atom bomb in 1945 to end Japan’s involvement in the Second World War.
There had been speculation that Abe would reciprocate by visiting Pearl Harbor with Obama during the final days of his presidency. The 75th anniversary of the attack falls this Wednesday, December 7.
Abe will go to Hawaii on December 26-27 for a summit with Obama, during which time he would remember the victims of the Pearl Harbor attack, his office said Monday. The prime minister’s wife, Akie Abe, visited Pearl Harbor in August, laying flowers at the USS Arizona Memorial and meeting a survivor of the attack.
The prime minister’s move will likely anger the more conservative forces in Abe’s right-wing government, who promote a revisionist view of Japan’s history and are seeking to restore Japan’s pride in its imperialist past.
While Abe shares some of these sympathies, he has also taken a pragmatic approach, issuing a statement expressing remorse for Japan’s World War II actions on the 70th anniversary of his country’s surrender last year. His government has also agreed on a final deal with South Korea to resolve the dispute over the Japanese army’s wartime use of women as sex slaves, euphemistically known as “comfort women.”
Just before 8am Hawaii time on December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Almost 200 aircraft bombed the site over 30 minutes, destroying the USS Arizona. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the ambush “a date which will live in infamy,” and the following day asked Congress to declare war on Japan.
Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
