Historic meeting at Pearl Harbor
Obama, Japan’s Abe honor victims of attack
President Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe paid emotional tribute Tuesday to the thousands of Americans who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor 75 years ago, and said the strong relations between their two nations in the decades since prove the power of reconciliation.
“Even the deepest wounds of war can give way to friendship and lasting peace,” Obama said after welcoming his Japanese counterpart to the site of the attack that drew the United States into World War II, a conflict that transformed America into a global superpower.
Describing Pearl Harbor as “a sacred place,” Obama said: “Here, in so many ways, America came of age.”
Abe, the first Japanese leader to pay a formal visit to Pearl Harbor, all but apologized for the attack of Dec. 7, 1941, offering his “sincere and everlasting condolences to the souls” of the more than 2,400 Americans who lost their lives in the surprise attack.
“We must never repeat the horrors of war,” Abe said.
The prime minister also thanked the United States for helping his nation recover — and develop a democracy — in the years after World War II, which ended with the U.S. atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Obama visited Hiroshima in May, a trip Abe reciprocated with the ceremony at Pearl Harbor.
Before their public remarks, Obama and Abe toured the memorial above the sunken USS Arizona. They visited the “shrine room,” placing wreaths of peace lilies in front of a wall adorned with the names of American service members killed in the attack. They later dropped purple flowers into the waters of the harbor.
The leaders also had a private meeting about U.S.-Japan relations, an alliance they praised during their public remarks.
“It has helped underwrite an international order that has prevented another world war,” Obama said, and the U.S.-Japanese alliance “has never been stronger.”
Abe said the U.S. and Japan have become the kind of allies “rarely found anywhere in history,” a development he attributed to the “power of reconciliation.”
Changes in the alliance could be imminent as Donald Trump prepares to become U.S. president on Jan. 20. During the campaign, Trump said Japan and other countries are taking advantage of the U.S. when it comes to trade deals. He also talked about demanding that Japan and other nations pay more for U.S. defense assistance.
Publicly, Obama and Abe largely laid modern politics aside in speaking of those who made the ultimate sacrifice at Pearl Harbor.
“Here in this quiet harbor,” Obama said, “we honor those we lost, and we give thanks for all that our two nations have won — together, as friends.”
Both Obama and Abe spoke of the sacrifices made by service members during the conflict that engulfed the world less than a century ago.
The sight of the Arizona, its gutted hull at the bottom of the harbor, is “a place that brought utter silence to me,” Abe said.
At the time of the attack and over the years, some citizens in Japan described the Pearl Harbor attack as retaliation for a U.S. oil embargo on their energy-starved country. A previous Japanese prime minister made an unannounced visit to Pearl Harbor in 1951, but Abe became the country’s first leader to participate in a ceremony at the attack site.
Obama may have made a reference to current events when he said that, even at times “when hatred burns hottest,” people “must resist the urge to demonize those who are different.”
Such are among the lessons of war, he said.
“The fruits of peace always outweigh the plunder of war,” Obama said. “This is the enduring truth of this hallowed harbor.”
“We must never repeat the horrors of war.” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe