Japanese Premier Abe lays wreaths ahead of Pearl Harbor visit

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe laid a wreath at a memorial on the Hawaiian island of Oahu ahead of a historic joint visit to Pearl Harbor with US President Barack Obama on Tuesday. The two leaders will later visit the Hawaiian naval base on the same island, where a 1941 attack by Japan brought the […]

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe laid a wreath at a memorial on the Hawaiian island of Oahu ahead of a historic joint visit to Pearl Harbor with US President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

The two leaders will later visit the Hawaiian naval base on the same island, where a 1941 attack by Japan brought the United States into World War II.

Abe arrived Monday in Hawaii – where the Obamas are on Christmas holiday – and was greeted by Governor David Ige.

Soon after touching down he visited the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and laid a ceremonial wreath.

The visit 75 years after the attack is aimed at highlighting how far the two allies have come and provides a symbolic bookend to Obama’s visit in May to Hiroshima, where the United States dropped the first atomic bomb.

The leaders are to visit the USS Arizona Memorial, a sweeping white structure suspended over the sunken remains of a ship destroyed during the battle.

Abe will not apologize for the surprise attack on December 7, 1941, Japanese government officials said.

The strike killed 2,403 Americans and left the US Pacific Fleet in tatters.

“I will visit Pearl Harbor with President Obama, and I want to demonstrate our remembrance (of the war dead) and the power of reconciliation to Japan, the United States and the world," Abe said at a dinner Monday evening with the island’s Japanese-American community.

But China criticized Abe’s visit, calling it “pretentious gestures.”

“Only Japan believes that it can settle accounts with the history of World War II by merely consoling the souls of victims in Pearl Harbor,” Hua Chunying, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told a news conference in Beijing on Monday.

“Without peace reconciliation with China and other victimized countries in Asia, Japan can never leave this part of history behind,” she said.

Though the visit will not be the first by a Japanese leader to the site, it will be the most prominent, as Abe stands alongside a sitting US president to pay tribute to those killed in the war between their nations.

In May, Obama became the first US president to visit Hiroshima, where US forces dropped a nuclear bomb at the end of the war, and Abe’s visit had initially been reported as the first by a Japanese leader to the US site.

In fact, premier Shigeru Yoshida made a low-key visit to the site in 1951 followed by two further prime ministers during the 1950s, the Japanese government confirmed.

In Hiroshima, Obama did not offer an apology for US actions, but speak about the need to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

Obama and Abe will hold a meeting before touring the USS Arizona Memorial and then making remarks to an audience of US, local and military officials that will also likely include veterans and survivors of the attack, said Daniel Kritenbrink, an advisor to Obama on Asia policy. (DPA)