Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday stopped at several memorials in Hawaii, one day before he will visit the site of the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor during a trip intended to show a strong alliance between his country and the United States.
Abe made no public remarks and stood in silence before a wreath of flowers at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, a memorial to people who died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.
Abe, joined by two of his Cabinet members, bowed his head before wreaths of white flowers and greenery laid at the feet of stone monuments at Makiki Cemetery in Honolulu dedicated to Japanese who settled in Hawaii in the 1800s.
The crowning event of the trip comes Tuesday, when Abe and U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Pearl Harbor, the site of the Japanese attack 75 years ago that drew the United States into World War II. Obama, who was born in Hawaii, is spending his winter vacation there.
Abe does not plan to apologize for the 1941 attack but to console the souls of those who died in the war, his aides said this month.
Japan hopes to present a strong alliance with the United States amid concerns about China’s expanding military capability. Japan was monitoring a group of Chinese warships that entered the top half of the South China Sea earlier on Monday.
Japanese leaders hope to send a unity message as well to President-elect Donald Trump, who triggered concerns before his Nov. 8 election by opposing the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and threatening to force allied countries to pay more to host U.S. forces.
Amid wind and rain on Monday, Abe presented a wreath at the armed forces memorial located at Honolulu’s Punchbowl Crater. After a moment of silence, he signed a guestbook and then stopped at the grave of former U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, who fought in World War II in Europe and whose parents were Japanese. He died in 2012.
Abe’s visit will come seven months after Obama became the first serving U.S. president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where the United States dropped an atomic bomb in the closing days of the war in 1945.
Will Japan’s Prime Minister Abe finally apologize for Unit 731, Japan’s staggeringly horrific and stunningly violent group that undertook experiments on male, female and child human subjects during WWII? These included vivisection, i.e., dissecting live subjects, without anesthesia, to remove internal organs to watch the effect of these nightmarish experiments on the subjects’ vital signs, freezing people until they perished to establish limits of survivability, subjecting prisoners to such high pressure than their eyes popped out and bodies exploded, among other unspeakable atrocities that went unpunished and not acknowledged by the Japanese. All of these subjects suffered deaths of the most malevolent and tortuous proportions. The elite of Japan’s medical schools undertook these programs in Unit 731 in China and Chinese, as well as American, Russian and other prisoners of war were subjected to this unbelievable horror! Abe, the world awaits your apology! Ghouls!
"Japan can never turn this page over without reconciliation from China and other victimized countries in Asia," . "Japanese leaders should stop being so evasive and dodging, and instead take a responsible attitude toward history and future, deeply and sincerely reflect upon the history of aggressive war, and draw a clear break with the past."
it pays to show remorse and regret of any past offence done to your current occupier but it won’t loosen the alliance leash.