Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Obama will honor those who died at Pearl Harbor , appearing together 75 years after Japan’s attack on Hawaii.
Abe’s visit comes seven months after Obama’s trip to Hiroshima in which he became the first sitting US president to visit the site where the United States dropped a nuclear bomb in 1945.
Although Abe is the fourth Japanese Prime Minister to visit Pearl Harbor, he is the first to visit the USS Arizona Memorial, a US battleship in which 1,177 Marines and sailors died after it sank in the harbor during the surprise attack on December 7, 1941.
While the visit marks the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it also comes weeks before the end of Obama’s administration and the beginning of Donald Trump’s.
Abe was Trump’s first in-person meeting with a foreign head of state after clinching the presidency in November. The visit came after Trump’s repeated suggestions during the campaign that Japan should shoulder a bigger financial burden regarding US military forces stationed in the region.
Abe had said he had been “very honored” to see the President-elect ahead of other world leaders.
“The Japan-US alliance is the axis of Japan’s diplomacy and security. The alliance becomes alive only when there is trust between us,” he said shortly after his November meeting with Trump.
Since assuming office in 2009, Obama had put US-Japan relations high on his agenda.