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Japanese Leader’s Pearl Harbor Visit May Not Be a First, After All

Shigeru Yoshida, then the prime minister of Japan, signing a treaty to normalize relations between his country and most of the victorious Allies in San Francisco in 1951. On his way home, he visited Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, home of the United States Pacific Fleet and the target of Japan’s raid in 1941.Credit...Associated Press

TOKYO — When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said this week that he would visit Pearl Harbor with President Obama, news organizations around the world reported that the visit would be the first ever by a Japanese premier to the naval base that his country attacked in 1941.

But it seems that the Japanese foreign ministry was incorrect about the trip being a historic first. Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida stopped in Hawaii in 1951 on his way home to Tokyo from San Francisco, where he had signed a treaty to normalize relations between Japan and most of the victorious Allies of World War II.

During his brief time on the island of Oahu, he paid a formal visit to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, a mountaintop shrine dedicated to American war dead, and, it now appears, made a less public stop at Pearl Harbor.

A search of Japanese newspaper archives turned up a 1951 dispatch from the daily Yomiuri Shimbun. The newspaper reported that the premier had indeed gone to the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.

No ceremonies or other public events appear to have taken place while Mr. Yoshida was at the base. Only 10 years after the surprise attack, a Japanese leader making a splashy appearance there could have stirred resentment in the United States.

Mr. Yoshida, who died in 1967, told a Yomiuri reporter who was traveling with him that the experience had left him “moved.”

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A memorial built over the wreckage of the battleship Arizona, which Japanese planes sank at Pearl Harbor. About half of the 2,400 Americans killed in the attack were on board.Credit...The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press

Japanese officials have not confirmed outright that Mr. Yoshida’s Pearl Harbor visit took place. But they have been qualifying their descriptions of Mr. Abe’s planned trip.

“Prime Minister Abe will be the first to visit the Arizona Memorial and the first to go to Pearl Harbor with an American president,” Yoshihide Suga, a spokesman for Mr. Abe’s government, said on Thursday.

He was referring to the monument built in 1962 over the wreckage of the battleship Arizona, sunk by Japanese planes.

The New York Times, which was among the news organizations to report that Mr. Abe would be the first Japanese prime minister to visit Pearl Harbor, also covered Mr. Yoshida’s stop in Hawaii but did not mention that he went to Pearl Harbor. Other Japanese publications left out the visit, too.

But The Associated Press reported it, saying in an article dated Sept. 13, 1951, that Mr. Yoshida “yesterday paid the first official Japanese call on Pearl Harbor since Dec. 7, 1941.”

Toshikazu Inoue, the president of Gakushuin University in Tokyo, who has written extensively about Mr. Yoshida, said political conditions at the time probably contributed to the low-key nature of the visit.

The signing of the treaty “was the main focus of attention, as a historic event and symbol that Japan had reconciled with the U.S. and rejoined the international community,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Japanese Leader’s Pearl Harbor Visit May Not Be a First. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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