Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Pearl Harbor this month, the first by a Japanese leader, will not be to apologize for the Japanese attack 75 years ago that drew the US into World War II, Abe’s top aide said yesterday.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the purpose of Abe’s Dec. 26-27 visit was to console the souls of those who died in the war.
While the lack of an apology could disappoint some US war veterans, Abe hopes the visit will showcase the tight alliance between the former foes.
Experts say it is a message Abe wants to send to regional rival China and to US president-elect Donald Trump, who has criticized Tokyo as a free rider on defense.
“This visit is for the sake of consoling the souls of those who died in the war, not for the sake of an apology,” Suga told a news conference one day after Abe announced the visit.
“I think that the prime minister’s visit will be an opportunity to send the message that the calamity of war must not be repeated and ... express the value of reconciliation between Japan and the United States,” he said.
The visit to Hawaii with US President Barack Obama could also boost Abe’s popularity rating — already robust at about 60 percent — and raise the likelihood that he will call a snap election for the Japanese House of Representatives.
It will come seven months after Obama became the first serving US president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where the US dropped an atomic bomb in the closing days of the war in 1945.
“The planning for a Pearl Harbor visit has been in the works ever since Obama visited Hiroshima. It’s mostly a reciprocal gesture and symbolic of the US and Japan burying the hatchet,” Columbia University emeritus professor Gerry Curtis said.
A boost in popularity ratings would give Abe a freer hand to call a snap election next month before opposition parties are ready. No election is needed until 2018, but speculation persists that Abe wants to call a vote sooner to minimize losses for his ruling bloc, which holds a two-thirds majority in the chamber.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.