Japanese PM Shinzo Abe confirms he will visit Pearl Harbour with Barack Obama
Abe will become the first Japanese leader to visit the site of the surprise Japanese attack, carried out on December 7, 1941
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is to become the first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbour, announcing on Monday a trip to Hawaii this month for talks with US President Barack Obama.
Abe, who will be in Hawaii on December 26 and 27, will visit the site of the surprise Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, that began the second world war in the Pacific.
I want to make it an opportunity to signal the value of Japan-US reconciliation
In Hiroshima 140,000 people died in the immediate blast on August 6, 1945, or later from radiation exposure. The Nagasaki bomb, dropped on August 9, killed more than 70,000 people.
Obama gave a soaring speech in Hiroshima that, while it offered no apology, was generally well received in Japan as it focused on the suffering of the atomic bomb victims.
“We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in the not-so-distant past,” Obama said in his speech at a cenotaph in the now thriving city, as a handful of surviving victims looked on. “We come to mourn the dead.”
Obama had insisted before the trip that he would not revisit decisions made by then-president Harry Truman at the close of the brutal war, thus quashing any possibility of an apology.