Expedient needs not good basis for reconciliation

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's upcoming visit to Pearl Harbor later this month could be as historic and eye-catching as US President Barack Obama's trip to Hiroshima seven months ago.

Abe will be the first Japanese prime minister to visit the site of Japan's notorious attack on the United States in 1941, while Obama was the first US sitting president to visit the city on which the US dropped an atomic bomb in World War II.

Yet, just as Obama's journey to Hiroshima did not change the rationale for the US' decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug 6, 1945 and another one on Nagasaki three days later, Abe's visit to Pearl Harbor and to the USS Arizona Memorial will never overturn the fact that Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was a war crime. As were the invasions Japan launched against China and its other Asian neighbors.