Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has laid wreaths and visited memorials in Hawaii ahead of a visit to the site of the 1941 bombing that plunged the United States into the second world war.

Abe landed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam for the historic visit and then headed to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, where he laid a wreath. He stood for a moment of silence at the cemetery near downtown Honolulu, which is known as Punchbowl.

He later visited a nearby memorial for nine boys and men who died when a US navy submarine collided with their Japanese fishing vessel in 2001. At the Ehime Maru Memorial, he again laid a wreath and bowed his head.

Abe will be the first Japanese prime minister to visit the memorial that honours sailors and marines killed in the attack that prompted America to enter the second world war.

Japan’s former leader Shigeru Yoshida went to Pearl Harbor six years after the country’s surrender, but that was before the USS Arizona Memorial was built.

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe and the director of the National Memorial of the Pacific, James Horton. Photograph: Hugh Gentry/Reuters

The memorial will be closed to the public on Tuesday when Abe visits, joined by US president Barack Obama, who is on holiday in Hawaii with his family.

The importance of the visit may be mostly symbolic for two countries that, in a remarkable transformation, have grown into close allies in the decades since they faced off in brutal conflict. At the same time, its u significant that it has taken more than 70 years for US-Japanese relations to get to this point.

Abe will not apologise for Japan’s attack when he visits, the government spokesman said earlier this month.

Chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga said: “The purpose of the upcoming visit is to pay respects for the war dead and not to offer an apology.”

The visit comes six months after Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima for victims of the US atomic bombing of that city at the end of the same war.