Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is planning to visit later this week a war memorial site in Darwin, a northern Australian city bombed by the Japanese military during World War II, Japanese diplomatic sources said Monday.

Abe is expected to visit the Darwin Cenotaph with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in a symbolic show of postwar reconciliation that has allowed the two countries to become strategic partners, the sources said.

The move follows Abe's visit in December 2016 to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the site of the 1941 attack by Japan that brought the United States into WWII, and former U.S. President Barack Obama's trip in May that year to Hiroshima, which was devastated by the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing.

(Michael Gunner chief minister of the Northern Territory, lays a wreath at Darwin Cenotaph War Memorial on Feb. 19, 2018)

These visits showcased postwar Japan-U.S. reconciliation and the Japanese government is hoping to also share with Australia the importance of future-oriented relations, the sources said.

The bombing of Darwin on Feb. 19, 1942, is said to be the first attack by a foreign power on mainland Australia during the war. More than 240 people were killed by the air raid in the former stronghold of Allied forces. Darwin later suffered dozens more Japanese air attacks.

Abe will meet with Morrison for the first time since the Australian leader took office in August.

The Japanese premier is expected to cement ties with Australia by promoting Tokyo's "free and open Indo-Pacific" policy, designed to promote stability and prosperity in areas between Asia and Africa rooted in rule-based order and freedom of navigation, as well as confirm their cooperation in maritime security.

Abe will visit Australia in between Association of Southeast Asian Nations-related meetings in Singapore and a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Papua New Guinea.

When Abe traveled to Papua New Guinea in July 2014, he offered flowers at a memorial site commemorating the war dead including Japanese soldiers. At that time, he called for cooperation in collecting the remains of Japanese troops who died during the war.