Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor with President Obama on Tuesday — 75 years after the sneak attack propelled the US into war with Japan.
Japan’s news media at first trumpeted the visit as a historic moment, saying that the conservative Abe was the first sitting Japanese prime minister to visit the site and attend an observance there.
But since then, media reports from the States as well as the Pacific island nation suggest that Abe may only be the third — or even fourth — prime minister to visit the historic Hawaiian site.
Abe wasn’t even born when Japan’s former leader Shigeru Yoshida went there in 1951 just six years after the country’s World War II surrender, reportedly by himself and feeling awkward.
Yoshida is best remembered for signing the San Francisco peace treaty with the US and others in 1951, allowing Japan back into international society after its war defeat.
His Pearl Harbor visit, which he made on his way home from San Francisco, was largely eclipsed by the historic treaty.
Archival writings and photos unearthed by the Associated Press reconstruct Yoshida’s visit, from his aim to win US trust to how he was put at ease by the US Navy commander’s dog.
And a Hawaiian Japanese-language newspaper reported last week that it had found archival articles about a pair of other visits to the memorial by sitting Japanese prime ministers in the 1950s.
So Japanese officials are now threading needles, saying Abe’s visit will be the first by a sitting prime minister with a US president to the memorial on the USS Arizona, the American battleship that suffered the worst losses.
But don’t expect Abe to apologize for the devastating aerial bombardment after Obama declined to apologize for the US dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during a visit to the former city last May.