Photo/Illutration Iwoto island (Naoko Kawamura)

For the first time in history, the defense ministers of Japan and the United States will attend a memorial service together on Iwoto island, the site of some of the fiercest fighting in World War II.

The event, scheduled for late March, is intended to show reconciliation and the strength of the Japan-U.S. alliance, 80 years after the end of that war.

The joint attendance of Defense Minister Gen Nakatani and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will provide “a symbol of the strong defense cooperation conducted by two nations that once engaged in bloody fighting” after U.S. troops landed on what was then known as Iwojima island in February 1945, said a high-ranking Defense Ministry official.

Located about 1,200 kilometers south of Tokyo, the island was considered vital by both sides in the waning days of World War II. Japan considered it a bastion for defending the homeland, while the United States saw it as a key base for launching bombing raids on the Japanese mainland.

In less than two months of fighting, about 7,000 U.S. and 21,900 Japanese soldiers were killed.

The fighting is memorialized in the United States with a statue near Arlington National Cemetery depicting U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwoto.

U.S. President Donald Trump issued a statement on Feb. 19, the 80th anniversary of the battle’s start, that said in part, “In spite of a brutal war, the United States-Japan Alliance represents the cornerstone of peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.”

The island was returned to Japan in 1968 and members of the Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces have been stationed there.

Since 1991, the U.S. military has used the island for field carrier landing practices. 

According to several diplomatic sources, in addition to attending a memorial ceremony on Iwoto, Nakatani and Hegseth will hold their first face-to-face defense meeting in Tokyo in early April.

At the meeting, they plan to discuss cooperation in command-and-control operations between the SDF and the U.S. military following a new integrated operations command the SDF will launch in late March.

They are also expected to coordinate a future “two-plus-two meeting” of the foreign and defense ministers of both nations.

U.S. officials will likely call on Japan to further increase its defense spending from the planned 2 percent of gross domestic product that the government has set as a goal for fiscal 2027.

On March 4, Elbridge Colby, who has been nominated for undersecretary of defense for policy, the No. 3 job in the Pentagon, submitted a statement to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in which he said Japan should spend 3 percent of its GDP on defense.

(This article was written by Mizuki Sato and Nobuhiko Tajima.)

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