WASHINGTON, Dec. 21, Kyodo — U.S. President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are expected to highlight “the power of reconciliation” at a ceremony they will attend next week in Hawaii to remember those killed in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, a White House official said Wednesday.   Obama is expected to say Tuesday’s….Read more

Several Japanese government sources revealed on Dec. 21 that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has decided to visit the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, where U.S. soldiers who died in the Vietnam War and other battles are buried, and the Makiki Japanese Cemetery, where the graves of the Imperial Japanese Navy soldiers are located, during his visit to Hawaii on….Read more

The Japan-U.S. alliance strengthened under the administrations of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and U.S. President Barack Obama, as witnessed by the enactment of the security legislation. At present, Japan-U.S. relations are very stable, and this is also apparent in the [Yomiuri-Gallup poll] results.

Yomiuri published the results of a public opinion poll taken jointly with Gallup in both the U.S. and Japan that showed 57% of Japanese and 48% of Americans called present bilateral relations “good.” Both figures remained almost the same as last year. However, some 41% of Japanese, up 34 points, and 40% of Americans (up 26 points) projected that the….Read more

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is seeking to hold talks with Donald Trump in Washington in late January, soon after Trump is inaugurated as the new U.S. president.   The Abe administration has kept this plan secret because Abe’s meeting with President-elect Trump in November provoked an angry protest from outgoing President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, who….Read more

Yomiuri and Mainichi claimed that the GOJ has asked the Trump transition team to arrange a bilateral summit in Washington right after he assumes office on Jan. 20, noting that PM Abe is hoping for a meeting on Jan. 27. The papers said the Abe administration believes that a summit meeting with the U.S. leader on the proposed date would….Read more

Kent E. Calder, director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University, noted in an interview with the Nikkei Shimbun that the Japan-U.S. nuclear energy treaty, which will expire in 2018, “may become the first Japan-U.S. issue that the administration of President-elect Trump may face [after its inauguration].” While he mentioned that the likelihood of the….Read more