Abe, Obama decry ‘horrors of war’ during historic Pearl Harbor visit
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IN a historic pilgrimage, the leaders of Japan and the United States took to the hallowed waters of Pearl Harbor on Tuesday to prove that even the bitterest enemies can become allies.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not apologize, but conceded Japan “must never repeat the horrors of war again.”
Seventy-five years after Japan’s surprise attack sent America marching into World War II, Abe and President Barack Obama peered down at the rusting wreckage of the USS Arizona, clearly visible in the tranquil, greenish-blue water.
More than 1,000 US war dead remain entombed in the submerged ship and, in a show of respect, Obama and Abe dropped purple petals into the water and stood in silence.
“As the prime minister of Japan, I offer my sincere and everlasting condolences to the souls of those who lost their lives here, as well as to the spirits of all the brave men and women whose lives were taken by a war that commenced in this very place,” Abe said later at nearby Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
That was the closest he would get to an apology. But it was enough for Obama, who also declined to apologize seven months ago when he became America’s first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, where the US dropped an atomic bomb in a bid to end the war.
It was enough, too, for Alfred Rodrigues, a US Navy veteran who survived the attack. The 96-year-old said he had no hard feelings, adding: “War is war.”
“They were doing what they were supposed to do, and we were doing what we were supposed to do,” Rodrigues said ahead of the visit.
Abe, who became the first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor with a US president, said the visit “brought utter silence to me.”
His remarks capped a day that was carefully choreographed by the US and Japan to show a strong and growing alliance between the former foes.
They started with a formal meeting at another nearby military base, in what the White House said was likely Obama’s last meeting with a foreign leader before leaving office in January. It was a bookend of sorts for the president who, nearly eight years ago, invited Abe’s predecessor to be the first leader he hosted at the White House.
Japanese officials said that in their talks on Tuesday, Abe and Obama agreed to closely monitor the movements of China’s first and sole aircraft carrier, which has sailed into the Western Pacific for the first time.
At their meeting, the two leaders affirmed that movements by the Chinese carrier Liaoning “warrant close attention from mid-term and long-term perspectives,” the officials said.
Late last week, the Liaoning advanced into the Western Pacific for scheduled blue water training .
Obama, speaking after he and Abe had laid green-and-peach wreaths at the memorial, called the harbor a sacred place and said that “even the deepest wounds of war can give way to friendship and lasting peace.”
The leaders greeted survivors in the crowd, shaking hands and hugging some of the men who fought in the December 7, 1941, battle that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a “date which will live in infamy.”
Japanese leaders have visited Pearl Harbor before, but Abe was the first to have gone to the memorial above the sunken USS Arizona, where a marbled wall lists the names of the US troops who were killed in the Japanese attack.
For Abe, it was an act of symbolic reciprocity, coming seven months after Obama and Abe visited Hiroshima together and renewed their calls for a nuclear-free future.
Still, both governments maintain the visits were separate and not contingent on one another.
In the years after Pearl Harbor, the US incarcerated around 120,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps before dropping atomic bombs in 1945 that killed some 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
Since the war, the US and Japan have built a powerful alliance that both sides say has grown during Obama’s tenure.
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