International News

TOKYO,(MILLAT+APP/AFP) – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
will honour war dead but won’t apologise when he becomes the first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor this month, a top government spokesman said Tuesday.
The move follows Barack Obama’s historic May trip to Hiroshima, the
first by a sitting US president, where he spoke of victims’ suffering but offered no apology for dropping the world’s first nuclear bomb.
Abe will pay his respects to those who died in Japan’s surprise 1941
attack at the US naval base in Hawaii, which triggered World War II in the Pacific, and highlight a decades-old security alliance between the former enemies.
“The purpose of this visit is to commemorate war dead, not to
apologise,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a regular press briefing in Tokyo.
“The visit will serve as an opportunity to demonstrate to future
generations our resolve not to repeat the horror and suffering of war as well as an opportunity to showcase the reconciliation between Japan and the United States,” he added.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the deadly December 7, 1941
assault on the US naval base.
The war ended in August 1945 after the US dropped two nuclear bombs
on Japan and, although the countries have forged strong ties in the seven decades since, how the war began and concluded has cast a long shadow.
Abe — a nationalist who has been criticised for playing down his
country’s wartime record — will be in Hawaii on December 26 and 27 for talks with Obama, who will join him at Pearl Harbor.
In Hiroshima, Obama and Abe went to an atomic bomb memorial — a
visit that sparked speculation that Abe might go to Pearl Harbor in return.
The US leader lay a floral wreath and reiterated his call for the
abolition of nuclear weapons but did not apologise for the attack and a subsequent bombing of Nagasaki that ended the war.