Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken will make a short condolence visit to Japan next week following the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Foreign Office said on Sunday. Blinken will travel to Tokyo on Monday to pay his respects to the former leader and meet with senior Japanese officials before returning to Washington from an Asian tour he is now wrapping up.
“Secretary Blinken will travel to Tokyo, Japan to express his condolences to the Japanese people on the death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and to meet with senior Japanese officials,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement. “The US-Japan alliance is a cornerstone of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific and has never been stronger.”
Blinken is in Thailand on a pre-scheduled visit and was in Indonesia on Friday for a meeting of foreign ministers of the Group of 20 countries in Bali when Abe was shot dead. He will be the highest-ranking US official to visit Japan since Abe’s death. In Bali on Saturday, Blinken said Abe’s killing was a “tragedy” for the world and, like many current and former US officials, praised the former prime minister. minister for his vision.
“Prime Minister Abe was a transformative leader, a statesman, someone of truly global stature,” Blinken told reporters. He added that Abe’s death rocked the G-20 meeting with many of his fellow foreign ministers expressing shock and anguish at the news. Shortly after Abe was pronounced dead, Blinken met in Bali with Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa and South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin to review strategy regarding North Korea in particular. At that meeting and again on Saturday, Blinken emphasized the importance of the US-Japan relationship.
“The Japan-United States alliance has been a cornerstone of our foreign policy for decades, and as I said yesterday, Prime Minister Abe has really taken that partnership to new heights,” he said.”The friendship between Japanese and Americans is also unshakable,” Blinken said. “So we stand with the Japanese people, with the Prime Minister’s family, after a really, really appalling act of violence.”
