Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Iwoto on Sunday to attend a memorial service to mark the Battle of Iwojima, the government said Wednesday.

Abe will also inspect the government's work to recover the remains of war dead on the Pacific island, which lies about 1,250 km south of Tokyo. Only half of the bodies of the some 22,000 Japanese soldiers who died on the island during the spring 1945 battle, one of the bloodiest in the Pacific War, have been retrieved so far. The U.S. returned Iwojima to Japan in 1968. The government later renamed it Iwoto.