“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. Putting 75 years of resentment behind them, the leaders of the United States and Japan are coming together at Pearl Harbor for a historic pilgrimage to the site where a devastating surprise attack sent America marching into World War II.Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit Tuesday 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. They shook hands and hugged some of the men who fought in the Dec. 7, 1941, battle that 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 go to the memorial above the sunken USS Arizona, where a marbled wall lists the names of U.S. troops killed in the Japanese attack. It's 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.For Abe, it's an act of symbolic reciprocity, coming six months after Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima in Japan, where the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb in hopes of ending the war it entered after Pearl Harbor. “That we are here today is the result of years of efforts at all levels of our government and societies, which has allowed us to jointly and directly deal with even the most sensitive aspects of our shared history.”

In the years after Japan’s attack, the U.S. 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. (PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii)—Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Hawaii on Monday to recognize the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941. 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.No apology needed, said 96-year-old Alfred Rodrigues, a U.S. Navy veteran who survived what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a "date which will live in infamy. “They were doing what they were supposed to do, and we were doing what we were supposed to do.”

Abe’s visit is not without political risk given the Japanese people’s long, emotional reckoning with their nation’s aggression in the war. Though the history books have largely deemed Pearl Harbor a surprise attack, Japan’s government insisted as recently as this month that it had intended to give the U.S. prior notice that it was declaring war and failed only because of “bureaucratic bungling.”

“There’s this sense of guilt, if you like, among Japanese, this `Pearl Harbor syndrome,’ that we did something very unfair,” said Tamaki Tsukada, a minister in the Embassy of Japan in Washington. “I think the prime minister’s visit will, in a sense, absolve that kind of complex that Japanese people have.”

Since the war, the U.S. and Japan have built a powerful alliance that both sides say has grown during Obama’s tenure, including strengthened military ties.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe makes a landmark visit to Naval Station Pearl Harbor in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, offering "sincere and everlasting condolences" to the victims of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese empire on December 7, 1941.