Japanese PM Shinzo Abe on historic visit to US lays wreaths in Hawaii ahead of visit to Pearl Harbor

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe lays wreaths on Hawaii Memorial. Photo credit:Hugh Gentry/Reuters

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has visited several memorials in Hawaii, ahead of a visit to Pearl Harbor, the US naval base attacked by the Japanese in 1941.

Abe will be accompanied by US President Barack Obama, making the visit the first by the leaders of both countries since the attack.

Abe will pray for the dead but will not issue an apology, his aides said.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour killed 2,300 US servicemen and propelled the US into World War Two.

After landing, the Japanese prime minister first headed to National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, and laid down a wreath.

Pearl Habor

He stood for a moment of silence at the cemetery near downtown Honolulu, a memorial to those who died.

All eight battleships at the base were damaged and four were sunk. But the key US aircraft carriers were at sea at the time.

On Tuesday, Abe and Obama will pray for the dead at the site of the attack before holding a summit meeting in Hawaii, their last before Obama steps down in January.

Abe’s visit, three weeks after the 75th anniversary of the attack, follows a visit earlier this year to Hiroshima by Obama, reports the BBC.

He became the first serving US president to visit the Japanese city, where about 150,000 people are believed to have been killed in 1945 by a US atomic bomb.

The first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbour was Shigeru Yoshida who in 1951 stopped over in Hawaii both on the way to and from the signing of the peace treaty with the US in San Francisco.

His visit on the way home included a meeting with the commander of the US Pacific fleet, Admiral Arthur Radford. The office where the two men met offered a direct view of the site of the Japanese attack.

“I could almost see the wreck of Arizona” out of the window, Radford later wrote in his memoir, referring to a battleship that sank in the attack.

He recalled the meeting as having been initially rather awkward until his dog walked over to the Japanese visitor to be patted, breaking the ice between the two former enemies.

Source: New Telegraph