Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit today with President Barack Obama is powerful proof that the former enemies have transcended the recriminatory impulses that weighed down relations after the war, Japan's government has said.
Although Japanese leaders have visited Pearl Harbor before, Abe will be the first to visit the memorial that now rests on the hallowed waters above the sunken USS Arizona.
For Abe, it's an act of symbolic reciprocity, coming six months after Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima in Japan, where the US dropped an atomic bomb in hopes of ending the war.
"This visit, and the president's visit to Hiroshima earlier this year, would not have been possible eight years ago," said Daniel Kritenbrink, Obama's top Asia adviser in the White House.
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More than 2,300 Americans died on December 7, 1941, when more than 300 Japanese fighter planes and bombers attacked.
More than 1,000 others were wounded. In the ensuing years, the US incarcerated roughly 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.
Abe will not apologise for Pearl Harbor, his government has said. Nor did Obama apologize at Hiroshima in May, a visit that he and Abe used to emphasize their elusive aspirations for a nuclear-free future.
"War is war," Rodrigues said as he looked at old photos of his military service. "They were doing what they were supposed to do, and we were doing what we were supposed to do."
After a formal meeting in the morning, Obama and Abe planned to lay a wreath aboard the USS Arizona Memorial, which is accessible only by boat. Then they'll go to nearby Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, where both leaders will speak.
Though the parallels with Obama's Hiroshima visit are palpable, both governments said that one visit wasn't contingent on the other.
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