Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has laid a wreath at the US National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as Punchbowl, in Hawaii.

Abe is the first Japanese prime minister to visit the memorial that honors sailors and Marines killed in the 1941 attack during World War Two.

Earlier this month, a Japanese government spokesman had said Abe wouldn't apologise for Japan's attack when he visits.

The visit comes six months after US President Barack 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.