In light of the 65th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
I’ve never been the sort of person who usually thinks about World War II. I don’t watch the History channel, I don’t read books about the war, and I’ve never taken an interest in visiting World War II battle sites, even when I lived close to those in Eastern Europe.
Yet when I realized earlier this winter that my first trip to Asia would place me in Tokyo on Pearl Harbor Day, I thought it would be informative to see what was happening that day in Japan.
Due to my western naiveté, I assumed that, in Japan, the Pacific War started on December 7, just as it did in the US. However, due to the international dateline, the war is generally regarded as having stared on Dec 8, the date when the Emperor of Japan issued a declaration of war against the US.
I also found out that, despite my best research, there really wasn’t much to see on Pearl Harbor Day in Japan. As the helpful concierge at the Sheraton where I was staying softly said (while physically drawing back from me), “No one wants to remember those times. They were terrible.” My new American expat acquaintances who live in Japan told me that most of the public discussion and commemoration of the Second World War comes in August, with the anniversary of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Yet, on my way to discover that there was no story about Pearl Harbor Day in Japan, I ended up drastically changing the way that I think about that country.
On December 7, in search of a story—any story-- I went to Yaskuni Shrine of the war dead, and the associated Yushukan war museum, a museum which I had read was highly controversial. What I didn’t expect was that it would be personally distressing.
While walking thru the museum, I was surprised to find myself upset at seeing a Zero fighter prominently displayed in the museum’s foyer. As I walked through the exhibits at the museum, it was troubling for me to read about the Allied bombing raids bring described as “Attacks on the Japanese homeland.” Seeing the preserved Japanese kamikaze torpedo’s, preserved kamikaze planes and personal relics of the kamikaze crew (a.k.a. the “Special Attack Corps”) while reading about people who “tried to defend Japan with their own bodies” was possibly the most emotional I’ve ever been in a museum—and I’m not known for my light taste in travel entertainment.
Forcing myself to go back to the Yaskuni Shrine shrine on December 8, in search of a story, all I found a few WWII veterans posing at the shrine, a few Japanese servicemen, one lone protester, and a few more schoolchildren. If I hadn’t been there the day before, I wouldn’t have known it was anymore crowded than normal. Yet, being there gave me a lot to think about.
Weeks later, in another Tokyo museum, I saw hunks of molten metal that had fused when Americans bombed the city in the spring of 1945. I even read that American bomber crews could read their watches at 29,000 feet by the light of the flames from a burning Tokyo. Those images stuck with me, and have changed the way I view Japan.
