Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe and U.S. president, Barack Obama, on Tuesday travelled to Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor– the memorial site of a 1941 surprise attack by Japan that provoked the U.S. into entering World War II.
Although Japanese leaders have visited Pearl Harbor before, Abe is the first to visit the memorial that now rests on the waters above the sunken USS Arizona, 75 years after, according to Reuters.
The attack killed 2,403 Americans and more than 1,000 others were wounded in the Dec. 7, 1941 incident, when more than 300 Japanese fighter planes and bombers attacked.
In the ensuing years, the U.S. incarcerated roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps before dropping atomic bombs in 1945 that killed an estimated 140,000 people in the Japanese city Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
On Monday, Abe had stopped at several memorials in Hawaii, a day before he visited the site of the 1941 bombing, but made no public remarks and stood in silence before a wreath of flowers at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, a memorial to those who died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.
“I am very much looking forward to sending out a strong message on the value of reconciliation, as well as our sincere prayer for the souls of the war dead,” Abe, speaking through an interpreter, said at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu.
The Japanese leader had called U.S.-Japan relations an “alliance of hope” and said the devastation of war should not be repeated.
Earlier this year, Obama also became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, site of one of two U.S. nuclear strikes on Japan that helped precipitate the end of World War II.
For Obama, it is possibly the last time he will meet a foreign leader as president, White House aides said.
“This visit, and the president’s visit to Hiroshima earlier this year, would not have been possible eight years ago,” Daniel Kritenbrink, Obama’s top Asia adviser in the White House, said.
“That we are here today is the result of years of efforts at all levels of our governments and societies, which has allowed us to jointly and directly deal with even the most sensitive aspects of our shared history.”
The Japanese attack on an unsuspecting U.S. fleet moored at Pearl Harbor turned the Pacific into a major theatre of war.
The attack had been prepared in secret by Japan for months, but was over within two hours ad Japanese warplanes came out of nowhere to sink much of the U.S. fleet.
A reluctant America was drawn into the war already raging in Europe and its colonies, a war that ended after U.S. atom bombs razed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In May, Obama surveyed the preserved ruins in Hiroshima and revived his Nobel Peace Prize-winning call for a world without nuclear weapons. (NAN)