Abe, Obama hail reconciliation at Pearl Harbor

The leaders of war-time enemies America and Japan have made a poignant joint pilgrimage to Pearl Harbor, issuing symbolic declarations about the power of reconciliation and warning against the drumbeat of conflict.

Seventy-five years after Japanese fighter pilots brought the fires of war to idyllic Hawaii and dragged the United States into World War II, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe offered his “sincere and everlasting condolences.” 

The pair paid homage to the more than 2,400 Americans killed on December 7, 1941, delivering a wreath of peace lilies and standing in silence before a shrine to those lost on the USS Arizona - roughly half of all those killed. Abe’s visit is a high-profile mark of contrition by a leader for whom Japan’s wartime past is often a sensitive domestic issue.

“We must never repeat the horrors of war,” he said. “What has bonded us together is the power of reconciliation, made possible through the spirit of tolerance.” 

Obama - who last May made his own solemn pilgrimage to Hiroshima, the target of a US nuclear bomb that effectively ended the war - issued his own remarks that rang with history and America’s current hypercharged politics.

“I welcome you here in the spirit of friendship,” he told Abe. “I hope that, together, we send a message to the world that there is more to be won in peace than in war, that reconciliation carries more rewards than retribution.”