WASHINGTON (Kyodo) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba will visit him next week and he is looking forward to meeting with him.

Trump did not provide other details about Ishiba's visit, including the date of their meeting. But sources familiar with the plan said earlier this week that Ishiba would hold his first in-person summit with Trump, possibly on Feb. 7, in Washington to confirm the importance of the bilateral alliance's deterrence and response capabilities.

The Japanese government has told a senior ruling party lawmaker that Ishiba is scheduled to make a three-day trip to the United States from Thursday, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

"I have great respect for Japan. I like Japan," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

But Trump did not refer to the Japanese prime minister by name. Instead, he said, "Prime Minister (Shinzo) Abe was a very close friend of mine. What happened to him was so sad and one of the saddest days," referring to the former Japanese leader that he was particularly on good terms with during his first term.

Abe, who resigned in 2020 for health reasons, was fatally shot during an election campaign speech about two years later.

The planned meeting with Ishiba would be Trump's second with a foreign leader since he took office for a nonconsecutive second term on Jan. 20. On Tuesday, Trump is due to hold talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

As part of efforts to lay the groundwork for the first face-to-face meeting between Ishiba and Trump, Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya held talks with his new U.S. counterpart Marco Rubio in Washington just a day after Trump's inauguration.

At the time, Iwaya and Rubio agreed to elevate the bilateral relationship to "new heights" on all fronts.

They also agreed to step up cooperation multilaterally with like-minded countries such as the Philippines and South Korea to deal with major challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, where China is seeking to assert greater control.

At the upcoming meeting, Ishiba and Trump are expected to acknowledge the increasingly severe security environment in the region, amid continuing ballistic missile tests by North Korea.

In addition to highlighting a dramatic increase in Tokyo's defense spending, Ishiba is likely to explain to Trump that Japanese companies have played a pivotal role in generating growth and jobs in the United States, according to officials.

Given that Nippon Steel Corp.'s plan to buy United States Steel Corp. was blocked by Trump's predecessor Joe Biden in early January and the president's strong opposition to the sale of the iconic producer is also well known, Ishiba could stress that Japan has been the largest foreign direct investor in the United States for the last five years.