Tokyo: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will honour war dead but won’t apologise when he becomes the first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor this month, a top government spokesman said on Tuesday. The move follows US president Barack Obama’s historic May trip to Hiroshima, the first by a sitting US president, where he spoke of victims’ suffering but offered no apology for dropping the world’s first nuclear bomb.

Mr Abe will pay his respects to those who died in Japan’s surprise 1941 attack at the US naval base in Hawaii, which triggered World War II in the Pacific, and highlight a decades-old security alliance between the former enemies.