Prime Minister Shinzo Abe tours the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston with Edwin Schlossberg, (second from left) and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy (background right) on Sunday. | AP

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Abe kicks off eight-day U.S. visit; Congress address to be key focus

Kyodo, JIJI

BOSTON – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, on the first of an eight-day official visit to the United States, was greeted Sunday with a dinner hosted by Secretary of State John Kerry at his residence in Boston.

Kerry’s counterpart, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, accompanied Abe to the dinner event. Kishida was in the U.S. to take part in a so-called two-plus-two bilateral security meeting and attend events related to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in New York.

Ahead of the dinner, Abe visited a library commemorating former U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Boston. The late president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, now ambassador to Japan, gave him a tour of the library.

“I was impressed again to know how many things were achieved under President Kennedy’s brilliant leadership,” Abe told reporters after a tour of the library, home to documents and voice recordings related to the president.

After moving to Washington on Monday, Abe will hold talks with President Barack Obama a day later.

One of the highlights of Abe’s visit will be delivering a speech to a joint session of Congress, the first time for a Japanese prime minister to do so. The expected 40-minute speech will be closely watched as it is expected to foreshadow a statement he will issue in summer marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

During their summit talks, new Japan-U.S. defense cooperation guidelines, negotiations on a U.S.-led Pacific free trade initiative, and a proposed China-led development bank are likely to top the agenda, diplomatic sources and Japanese officials said.

“I hope to send a message for the creation of peace and prosperity in the 21st century and opening a new era by taking advantage of the strong Japan-U.S. bond,” Abe told reporters at Tokyo’s Haneda airport shortly before leaving for the United States, explaining the aim of the visit.

On his planned speech to the U.S. Congress, he expressed hope to tell of a vision about what Japan is going to do with the United States and what kind of world it seeks to realize.

Abe also said he plans to affirm with Obama a plan to alleviate Okinawa’s burden of hosting U.S. bases, based on a trustworthy relationship between Japan and the United States.

The Abe-Obama talks will come a day after the “two-plus-two” meeting of the foreign and defense chiefs of Japan and the United States in New York on Monday to finalize the first revision in 18 years of the guidelines.

The guidelines, which set the roles and missions of the Self-Defense Forces and U.S. military, are expected to be updated to expand the scope of SDF operations abroad amid China’s growing maritime assertiveness.

On the economic front, the leaders are expected to also reiterate the strategic importance of the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership initiative, one of the Japanese officials said.

On Thursday, chief negotiators from the United States, Japan and 10 other countries in the TPP framework resumed their talks in Washington to narrow the remaining gaps in the Pacific free trade initiative, while a U.S. House of Representatives committee passed a bipartisan bill that is expected to help lead to an early conclusion of the TPP.

Abe has expressed optimism in moving forward with the deal.

The White House said, however, that Abe and Obama are unlikely to make any announcement of a breakthrough in the TPP talks, as numerous thorny issues remain.

During his U.S. trip, Abe is scheduled to offer flowers at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia that honors U.S. veterans, an accustomed practice for Japanese prime ministers and defense ministers, and visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Such schedules are widely seen as a way for Abe to fend off criticism from Asian neighbors — China and South Korea — that he is not remorseful of Japan’s wartime past, observers say.

While Japan’s peace-related efforts since World War II have been recognized in the United States, Abe is viewed by some as having revisionist historical views, according to political analysts.

Abe will also visit Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and meet with business leaders and local communities.

“It’s a good thing to reaffirm Japan’s ties at the local levels” through his visits to cities other than the U.S. capital, a Japanese official said.

Photos

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Prime Minister Shinzo Abe tours the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston with Edwin Schlossberg, (second from left) and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy (background right) on Sunday. | AP U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry greets Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in front of Kerry's residence in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston on Sunday. | KYODO

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  • Liars N. Fools

    We should look at Abe Shinzo’s trip to America in terms of whether he can achieve a “blue line” of accomplishments in partnership with America without falling below a “red line” of historical revisionism that will upset not only the Koreans, America’s allies, and Chinese but also many Americans, too.

    First the blue line. Many powerful American interest groups want the TPP with Japan in it because it theoretically can pry open a market that is among the most advanced but which also has an incredible amount of protected sectors — agriculture and rice especially — and non-tariff barriers. Many defense and security interests want to end the Japanese “free ride” in which the Japanese are prepared to throw money at conflict areas but not military personnel and other assets despite having one of the strongest navies in the world and a highly capable Air Force (forget this Self-Defense Force terminology). This “free ride” would be replaced by an arrangement by which Japan continues to throw money but also puts boots on the ground and on decks and butts in cockpits. Most immediately this is justified as being aimed at North a Korea but increasingly explicitly this is aimed at China.

    And America and Japan do want to acknowledge together that since the end of a World War II 70 years ago, Japan has had the most remarkable record in the world of developing a liberal democracy that has conscientiously pursued peace and prosperity and which has shared a considerable amount of its success with developing nations, including China and Korea incidentally.

    Now for the red line. Abe Shinzo is too shrewd to offend America. The notion that he will perform as he did in Indonesia as well as in an earlier trip to Canberra is highly likely. He will invoke a memory that touches on Japanese actions in World War II, carefully evading words like aggression and invasion, and he will speak of his personal heart felt anguish and remorse and a vow that Japan will do all in its power to prevent such wide spread suffering ever again. Because the Congress has passed a resolution calling on Japan to refrain from historical revisionism on war time sexual slavery, Abe will likely use the words “human trafficking” to denounce violence against women that occurred during the 20th century — without specifically mentioning Japan’s major rounder the notion that “everybody was raping women” — and to call on international efforts to prevent such atrocities in these times. The Chinese and Koreans — and many American experts — will recognize such language as the weasel words that they are and denounce Abe’s tricky legerdemain. But most Americans who care about the subject will likely give Abe a passing mark, with some even praising Abe for his heart-felt remorse and expressing wonderment as to why Chinese and Koreans despise this visage of banality.

    • Hendrix

      Don’t think Abe is shrewd, dumb for sure , he will certainly use weasel words to get around his whitewashing of history.. one thing is for sure, he is poisonous to Japan and is on a mission to cleanse his grandfather and his grandfathers generation of war crimes and sex slavery…. in fact he should never have been asked to address congress, its pretty disgusting actually.