Barack Obama’s decision to make a first-of-a-kind presidential visit to Hiroshima, Japan, later this month prompted U.S. Rep. Mark Takai to invite Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to make a similar first-of-a-kind visit to Pearl Harbor for the 75th anniversary of the attack on Oahu.
Obama will be the first sitting president to visit the city ravaged by a U.S. atomic bomb in 1945, and Takai’s office said he has asked both of the countries’ leaders to attend the commemoration ceremony Dec. 7 in Hawaii.
“The U.S.-Japan alliance could not be stronger at this time, and I applaud President Obama’s decision to visit Hiroshima later this month as he goes to Asia,” Takai said in a release. “Even as we look back on tragedy, we must also recognize that over the years, our nation has moved through this tragedy to build a strong alliance with Japan, based on preserving peace and stability in the region since the end of the war.”
The Hawaii Democrat said it is his hope Obama and Abe will celebrate that partnership in Hawaii “while also continuing to work towards a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Foreign Affairs ran an article titled “Abe Should Visit Pearl Harbor,” while some Japanese media reported that the prime minister might make a Pearl Harbor stop in November tied to a Peru trip.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga downplayed the November timing at a news conference Wednesday but added, “I don’t know about the future.” The government of Japan is “not considering such an idea at all,” he said of a possible November Pearl Harbor visit.
No Japanese prime minister has visited Pearl Harbor since the war. Emperor Akihito planned to visit the site in 1994, but objections from Japan’s right led to him laying a wreath for war dead at Punchbowl cemetery instead. The emperor again laid a wreath at Punchbowl in 2009.
Obama’s visit to Hiroshima — and Abe’s to Pearl Harbor, should he decide to do that — will be fraught with symbolism, nuance and scrutiny. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Japanese city last month.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing more than 80,000 Japanese, with tens of thousands more dying of radiation exposure. More than 74,000 were killed in the second use of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later. Japan announced its surrender Aug. 15, 1945.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday that the president’s Hiroshima visit would be “forward-looking” and signal his ambition to realize “the goals of a planet without nuclear weapons.” The stop will not include an apology, Earnest said.
“If people do interpret it that way (an apology), they will be interpreting it wrongly,” Earnest said.
The use of the nuclear devices was a decision made nearly four years after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor with the intention of crippling the U.S. Pacific Fleet — precipitating the bloody Pacific war that followed.
Earnest noted that “there are a lot of people with a lot of opinions about this trip.” He also said there is “no diminishing the important contribution of the greatest generation of Americans (in World War II) who didn’t just save the United States, but, rather, saved the world from tyranny.”
Abe’s nationalist agenda has generated outside condemnation for trying to downplay Japan’s aggression in the war, although he told a joint session of the U.S. Congress in April 2015, “Our actions brought suffering to the peoples in Asian countries. We must not avert our eyes from that.”
He also said that on behalf of Japan, “I offer with profound respect my eternal condolences to the souls of all American people that were lost during World War II.”
Writing in Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations magazine, Zach Przystup said that a visit to Pearl Harbor by Abe would build on that momentum, “show a stronger awareness of Japan’s painful past” and demonstrate that “Japan is more committed to promoting peace than in revising its own history.”
Przystup, assistant director for global executive and diplomatic education at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said such a visit could also help make Japan’s expansion of its self-defense forces more palatable to neighboring countries.
The White House was noncommittal this week regarding Obama’s possible visit to Pearl Harbor for the 75th anniversary.
“I don’t have any announcements at this point about any sort of presidential travel, or what the Japanese may do to mark that occasion,” Earnest said.
