The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Premier Abe plans to visit Pearl Harbor with Obama
He’ll become first sitting Japanese leader to see site.
TOKYO — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Monday that he would visit Pearl Harbor, becoming the first sitting Japanese leader to go to the site of Japan’s attack 75 years ago that pulled a stunned United States into World War II.Abe said in a televised news conference that he would travel to the U.S. naval base with President Barack Obama during a trip to Hawaii on Dec. 26 and 27.
By visiting Pearl Harbor, Abe will in effect be reciprocating a historic trip Obama made in May to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where the United States dropped a nuclear bomb at the end of the war with Japan in 1945. No sitting American president had previously visited the city.
“We must never repeat the horror of war,” Abe said Monday. “I want to express that determination as we look to the future, and at the same time send a message about the value of U.S.-Japanese reconciliation.”
Abe’s visit will come just a few weeks after the 75th anniversary of the attack, which occurred on Dec. 7, 1941. Carried out by Japanese bombers and fighter planes launched from aircraft carriers that had quietly slipped within striking distance of Hawaii, the attack killed more than 2,000 Americans and sank a number of U.S. warships, including the battleship Arizona, whose wreck has become a memorial to the battle.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, which did not deliver the knockout blow that its planners had hoped for, was a desperate gamble. Japan was waging a costly war in China, which had been dragging on for years, but its efforts there were foundering amid an American oil embargo. Striking the U.S. might break the impasse, the planners believed.
Japan’s own military analysts — including the master planner of Pearl Harbor, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto — thought taking on the stronger Americans would most likely be futile. But the alternative of admitting that Japan’s imperial ambitions had hit a dead end was intolerable.
Abe, a staunch conservative who has argued that Japan has been unfairly demonized for its wartime conduct, is perhaps uniquely positioned to visit Pearl Harbor. A more liberal Japanese prime minister would likely be savaged by the political right for a lack of patriotism.
In August, Abe’s wife, Akie, paid a quiet visit to Pearl Harbor and the Arizona memorial, fueling speculation that her husband would follow, although Japanese officials had maintained that there was no plan for him to do so.
In Hiroshima, Obama spoke of the perils of modern warfare and sought to comfort aging survivors of the atomic blast, which, along with the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki, killed more than 200,000 people.
Abe did not elaborate Monday on his plans for the Pearl Harbor visit, which will be carefully choreographed with U.S. officials. He said he hoped to “comfort the souls of the victims.”
In a statement, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Obama and Abe would visit the Arizona memorial together to honor those killed at Pearl Harbor.