Japan PM Shinzo Abe to visit Pearl Harbour in Dec

Tokyo: Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced on Monday that he would visit Pearl Harbour during his trip to Hawaii, scheduled in December, to hold talks with the US President Barack Obama.

This would make Abe the first Japanese leader ever to visit Pearl Harbour.

Abe will be in Hawaii on December 26 and 27 and will also visit the site where a surprise Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 initiated World War II in the Pacific.

Abe has decided to visit Pearl Harbour after the US President in May travelled to Hiroshima, the Japanese city where the United States executed world's first atomic bombing at the end of World War II. The bomb in Nagasaki was dropped several days later.

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Obama delivered a speech there in which he offered an apology. It was generally well received in Japan as it mainly focussed on the sufferings of the atomic bomb victims.

On August 6, 1945, the US attacked on Hiroshima with atomic bomb which killed 1,40,000 people in the immediate blast or later from radiation exposure. Day later, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki which claimed lives of more than 70,000 people.