Obama and Japanese premier perform rites at the Arizona

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe didn’t apologize Tuesday for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor 75 years ago, but his landmark visit to the USS Arizona Memorial with President Barack Obama spoke volumes about reconciliation.

“As the prime minister of Japan,” Abe said afterward, “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.”

Although other Japanese leaders quietly visited Pearl Harbor in the 1950s and remembered war dead during stops at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, it was the first visit to the Arizona Memorial by a sitting prime minister. The memorial was dedicated in 1962.

“I was very happy that he came to visit and represent his country,” Pearl Harbor survivor Sterling Cale, 95, said just before Abe and Obama’s visit to the memorial. “Like I told everybody, he don’t have to say, ‘We’re sorry,’ because we never said we’re sorry for (nuclear bombs dropped on) Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

“But if they both go out to the Arizona and the prime minister puts a wreath out there, the activity will say that they (the Japanese) are sorry, and words will never have to be said,” Cale added.

Abe and Obama spent just under 20 minutes on the memorial, which straddles the sunken battleship and grave for most of the 1,177 crew members killed in the surprise Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

The two leaders presented wreaths in the shrine room where the names of the Arizona’s fallen sailors and Marines cover a marble wall, and dropped purple-and-white orchids into the well that overlooks the Arizona’s rusting hull.

The two leaders said nothing during their brief visit, with the pair walking in unison to present wreaths of light pink anthuriums.

Obama’s wreath bore a white ribbon saying “In Remembrance, Barack Obama, President of the United States,” and Abe’s a ribbon that said “In Remembrance, Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan.”

Caroline Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to Japan, stood nearby with Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., head of U.S. Pacific Command; Defense Minister Tomomi Inada; and other dignitaries.

“It was a place which brought utter silence to me,” Abe said alongside Obama during remarks afterward on Pearl Harbor’s Kilo Pier. Behind the two leaders was the Arizona and battleship Missouri, upon which Japan formally surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay.

Abe, whose remarks were spoken in Japanese, described trying to put himself in the place of the young service members at Pearl Harbor — but didn’t refer to Japan’s responsibility for the attack that day.

“I can almost discern the voices of those crewmen,” Abe said. “Voices of lively conversations, upbeat and at ease, on that day, on a Sunday morning. Voices of young servicemen talking to each other about their future and dreams. Voices calling out names of loved ones in their very final moments. Voices praying for the happiness of children still unborn.”

The prime minister also noted the respect shown Zero fighter pilot Fusata Iida by the placement of a marker at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, where he crashed and died Dec. 7, 1941; the generosity and tolerance demonstrated by the United States toward Japan after the war; and the bonds that the two nations now share on the world stage.

“We are allies that will tackle together, to an even greater degree than ever before, the many challenges covering the globe,” Abe said. “Ours is an ‘alliance of hope’ that will lead us to the future.”

Obama, in Hawaii for his last presidential vacation before turning over the White House to Donald Trump on Jan. 20, called Abe’s visit to Pearl Harbor a “historic gesture that speaks to the power of reconciliation and the alliance between the American and Japanese peoples.”

The president called Pearl Harbor a “sacred place” and said that with the presentation of wreaths and flowers, “we think of the more than 2,400 American patriots, fathers and husbands, wives and daughters, manning heaven’s rails for all of eternity.”

At Pearl Harbor, “America’s first battle of the Second World War roused a nation,” Obama said. “Here, in so many ways, America came of age.”

Obama also pointed out that Japanese-Americans, many of whom were from Hawaii, served with distinction overseas with the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team while sometimes being denied basic liberties at home.

Among those in attendance at the Kilo Pier ceremony was Herbert Yanamura, 92, a Honolulu resident who served in the Military Intelligence Service as a linguist in the Leyte and Okinawa campaigns in the Pacific.

Yanamura said “reconciliation is already here” with Japan. “Only I think they (the two leaders) were stressing to strengthen that and to continue this relationship into the future.”

Abe’s visit to the Arizona Memorial with Obama is proof that former enemies Japan and the United States have transcended the recriminatory impulses that weighed down relations after the war, Japan’s government has said.

The 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.”

Abe’s visit to the Arizona Memorial is seen as a moral and strategic defining moment as Abe seeks acceptance of a larger Japanese role in Asia-Pacific security and other foreign affairs — by admitting its past wrongs and emphasizing it is a changed nation.

Moving beyond the painful legacy of the war has been easier for Japan and the U.S. than for Japan and its other former foes, such as South Korea and China. As Abe arrived in Hawaii, Beijing dismissed as “wishful thinking” the notion that Japan could “liquidate the history of World War II” by visiting Pearl Harbor.

“Japan can never turn this page over without reconciliation from China and other victimized countries in Asia,” said Hua Chunying, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman.

Between the United States and Japan, however, “our alliance has never been stronger,” Obama said. The relationship “stands as the cornerstone of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific, and a force for progress around the globe.”

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.