The 1st (4th?) Japan PM at Pearl Harbor
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor with President Obama on Tuesday.
Japan’s press at first trumpeted the visit as a historic moment, saying that the conservative Abe was the first sitting Japanese prime minister to visit the historic Hawaiian site.
But since then, media reports suggest Abe may be the third — or even fourth — prime minister to visit.
Abe wasn’t born when Japan’s former leader Shigeru Yoshida went there in 1951, six years after World War II, reportedly by himself and feeling out of place after his country’s defeat.
A Hawaiian Japanese-language newspaper reported last week that it had found archival articles about another possible two visits to the memorial by sitting Japanese prime ministers in the 1950s.
Japanese authorities also acknowledged that Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama visited the US Pacific Command in Honolulu in 1956, and that Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi paid a visit to the islands in 1957.
So Japanese officials now say Abe’s visit will be the first by a sitting prime minister with a US president to the memorial.
Abe landed in Hawaii Monday and laid wreaths in memoriam ahead of the Pearl Harbor visit.
He stood for a moment of silence at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and a cemetery near downtown Honolulu.