“We must never repeat the horror of war,” Mr. Abe said on Monday. “I want to express that determination as we look to the future, and at the same time send a message about the value of U.S.-Japanese reconciliation.”

Mr. Abe’s visit will come just a few weeks after the 75th anniversary of the attack, which occurred on Dec. 7, 1941. Carried out by Japanese bombers and fighter planes launched from aircraft carriers that had quietly slipped within striking distance of Hawaii, the attack killed more than 2,000 Americans and sank a number of United States warships, including the battleship Arizona, whose wreck has become a memorial to the battle.

Just as the decision to drop the bomb on Japan to end the war has long been the subject of a fraught moral and political debate in the United States, the decision to attack Pearl Harbor has been enormously delicate in Japan.

Politicians there still pay homage to the “heroes” of Pearl Harbor — meaning the Japanese aviators and others who died in the attack. There is a museum exhibit in their honor at Etajima, an island off Hiroshima, that once served as the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, a Japanese equivalent of the United States Navy’s training academy at Annapolis.

For decades, politicians have been reluctant to make any statement resembling an apology for the attack, which many in Japan argue was the natural outgrowth of an American-led oil embargo that would have starved the Japanese empire. There are still arguments over the role of Emperor Hirohito in the decision, and that of military officials who had argued at length about the wisdom or dangers of directly drawing the United States into the war.