Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Japanese prime minister to visit Pearl Harbor memorial
Shinzo Abe arrived in Hawaii Monday for a historic visit to recognize, but not apologize for, the 1941 attack.
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Hawaii on Monday to recognize the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Abe will be the first Japanese prime minister to visit the memorial that honors sailors, soldiers and Marines killed in the 1941 attack.
Japan’s former leader Shigeru Yoshida went to Pearl Harbor six years after the country’s World War II surrender, before the USS Arizona Memorial was built. Yoshida arrived in 1951, shortly after requesting a visit to Adm. Arthur W.R. Radford, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. His office overlooked Pearl Harbor, offering a direct view of the attack site.
The memorial will be closed to the public Tuesday when Abe visits the historic site, joined by President Barack Obama, who is vacationing in Hawaii with his family.
The importance of the visit may be mostly symbolic for two countries that, in a remarkable transformation, have become close allies in the decades since they faced off in brutal conflict. At the same time, it’s significant that it took more than 70 years for U.S.-Japanese relations to get to this point.
Abe won’t apologize for Japan’s attack when he visits, a government spokesman said earlier this month.
Chief Cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga said that “the purpose of the upcoming visit is to pay respects for the war dead and not to offer an apology.”
The visit comes six months after Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima, Japan, for victims of the U.S. atomic bombing of that city at the end of the same war.