by Craig Nelson
The architect chosen for the memorial was a refugee from Hitler’s Austria, Alfred Preis, whose first idea included an undersea viewing chamber for visitors to contemplate the wreckage directly, but this was considered too gruesome. His revision was the present swoop of concrete wave floating over the hull, which Preis said “sags in the middle but stands strong and vigorous at the ends, express[ing] initial defeat and ultimate victory. . . . The overall effect is one of serenity. Overtones of sadness have been omitted to permit the individual to contemplate his own personal responses . . . his innermost feelings. At low tide, as the sun shines upon the hull, barnacles which encrust it shimmer like gold jewels . . . a beautiful sarcophagus.”
Each day, a flag is raised and lowered on the Arizona. Since all of Kimmel’s fleet’s fuel tanks had been filled to the brim on December 7, about a quart of fuel bubbles up each day and, on reaching the surface, spreads into floating, iridescent rings. Otherwise strong-willed military historians will often describe these as “black tears,” and the drops’ eternal release make the ship seem, in a way, still alive.
A number of Arizona survivors have had their cremains placed in the wreckage to rejoin their December 7 brothers. Only those who were stationed on her that day can be interred within the ship itself, inside Turret 4; those who served with her but weren’t crew on December 7 can have their ashes scattered in the water. The two exceptions have been Joe James Custer, onetime executive secretary of the Pacific War Memorial Commission, and the memorial’s architect, Alfred Preis.
Others cannot even bear to visit. Arizona’s Ralph Bayard: “I’ve never dared to go near the Arizona Memorial. I was in and out of Pearl Harbor for years after the Arizona was out there, but the memorial was built after I retired from the navy. I don’t think I could go aboard it. But I have the layout of that ship indelibly in my mind. I’ll never forget it.”
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Today, the most Japanese city outside Japan is Honolulu. Hawaii’s top employers are the military and tourism. The state’s number one tourist attraction is Pearl Harbor. Two million visit the Arizona each year. Of the many who are Japanese, a local guide said, “For them this was a great victory, one of the greatest in their history.” It seems peculiar: Do British World War II enthusiasts, after all, visit Dresden on vacation, or Germans, Warsaw?
Research on four-hundred-odd National Park Service questionnaire replies by Japanese visitors showed that a majority saw the memorial as a peace monument similar to the many built across Japan, nearly all of which portray the Japanese as victims. One comment summed up this point of view: “Even though it was an unavoidable war, it is regrettable that young lives were destroyed in the water. I hope the peace will last.” A few Japanese did feel some shame. “Up until now, I had a bit of grudge [against America] for dropping the A-bombs,” a fourteen-year-old wrote. “But I saw this from the Americans’ perspective for the first time and realized that our ancestors did a very bad thing. I am so ashamed and want to apologize.” Others thought the Americans needed to understand that Japan, too, suffered, and that the National Park Service movie—which is remarkably evenhanded for a war memorial—should also include footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “The most impressive place I visited so far is the Arizona Memorial,” one wrote. “I even recommended my friend from ukulele class to go there. When I saw the film, I just could not hold back my tears. . . . [It] should also be shown in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In turn, the memorial should also show a film on the A-bombs. This to show that both nations suffered a great deal and there is no happiness in wars.”
This Japanese perspective has remained constant for decades. When MacArthur’s troops first arrived in August 1945, Prime Minister Naruhiko Higashikuni offered that, if the Americans made an effort to forget about Pearl Harbor, the Japanese would do the same for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But if Pearl Harbor’s visitor center included reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it would be hard to imagine that they would be portrayed as a reason for American shame, as the Japanese imagine, but instead as moments of triumph and retribution. Of course, nothing about the Ear Mound, the rape of Nanking, the horrible crimes unleashed against the Chinese peasants who helped the Doolittle Raiders, or any of Japan’s many war atrocities are mentioned at their own peace memorials.
To the Japanese, Pearl Harbor is a horror that led to more horror. To Americans, it is a rallying cry for a nation, and a horror that led to triumph. The Japanese see no parallels between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001. US visitors to Pearl Harbor dramatically escalated in numbers after 9/11, showing that Americans do feel a resonance.
Before one takes the launch to Arizona’s viewing platform and marble cenotaph, a documentary narrated by Stockard Channing tells those who lost their lives that day, “Your future has been taken from you, but with this memorial, you will never be forgotten.” It concludes, “How shall we remember them, those who died? Mourn the dead. Remember the battle. Understand the tragedy. Honor the memory.”
Most Holy Spirit! Who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
And bid its angry tumult cease,
And give, for wild confusion, peace;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
—“Navy Hymn”
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When General George MacArthur died on April 15, 1964, at the age of eighty-four, former presidents Eisenhower and Truman did not attend the funeral, but former prime minister Yoshida of Japan did.
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After a thirty-three-year career with the navy, Rear Admiral Samuel Fuqua died on January 27, 1987, at the age of eighty-seven and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
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Hirohito remained on the Chrysanthemum Throne for sixty-two years, the longest reign in all of Japanese history, until his death, in 1989. That same year, on August 15, the eighty-four-year-old General Minoru Genda died. Of the war, he said, “I thought we would win, but we misjudged America’s real strength. We lacked war matériel, and our national leadership was not up to the task.” He also said that Japanese troops should have occupied Hawaii and turned it into a base for attacking the American mainland, and that the Japanese can feel no moral superiority over Hiroshima and Nagasaki since, if Japan had developed nuclear weapons, it would certainly have used them against the United States. In 1962, the American government awarded him the highest honor it can grant a foreigner, the Legion of Merit, for his rebuilding of Japan’s air forces, and that year he was elected to Japan’s parliament, where he would remain until 1986, and become a leading figure in the Liberal Democratic Party.
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Ellen Lawson: “In the last years of his life, Ted Lawson was in a great deal of pain and required painkilling medication, but his mind was still as bright as ever. He was limited in what he could do, though, because every time he moved, he was in pain. He thought amputees just had to suffer, but in fact it turned out he’d broken his back, which for many years we didn’t know. On January 19, 1992, Ted had a pulmonary aneurysm and died. He was interred at Chico Cemetery Mausoleum in Chico, California. Today, I still live on our acre of walnut trees. And I just finished the harvest; it went well, in spite of the winds and the rain. All I can think is ‘Finished!’ ”
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In 1993, Lieutenant General James Doolittle’s own silver Raider cup was turned over. The daredevil-may-care flying ace, known for his risky, outrageous stunts, a man who called himself “a crackpot pilot,” had lived to the ripe old age of ninety-six, passing away at his son John’s home in Pebble Beach, California. Just before the general died, even after all his achievements and acclaim, he told a reporter, “There has never been a time when I’ve been completely satisfied with myself.” Jimmy and his wife, Joe, are buried side by side in Section 7-A of Arlington National Cemetery.
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On November 25, 2006, ace pilot Kenneth Taylor passed away in Tucson. His par
tner in history, George Welch, had died in October 1954 while working as chief test pilot for North American Aviation in California’s Antelope Valley.
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On May 26, 2010, John Finn, the last surviving Medal of Honor bluejacket from Pearl Harbor, died at the age of one hundred. In 2001, Finn had been one of the vets invited to Hawaii to see the premiere of Disney’s Pearl Harbor. “It was a damned good movie,” he insisted. “It’s helped educate people who didn’t know about Pearl Harbor and what happened there. I liked it especially because I got to kiss all those pretty little movie actresses.”
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While Ford Island’s Luke Field is now a meadow, and its forty-two-thousand-square-foot seaplane hangar that survived December 7 is now home to the Pacific Aviation Museum, Hickam and Wheeler still have some .50-caliber bullets stuck in their peach-colored concrete walls. We can also be certain that remaining in Arizona are what we know can survive in such a watery tomb: human teeth. By the tens of thousands.
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Sailor Donald Raymond: “I seen the Arizona blow up. I seen the California on fire and I seen her sink. I seen the Oklahoma roll over. The whole harbor was nothing but a big sheet of black smoke. I never want to go through it again, I know that. And they say—ya know, whenever we go to these schools—they all say ‘the heroes’ and that. Well, the real heroes are the ones that’s still over there. The Arizona. The Utah. The Utah was on the other side of Ford Island, and you don’t hear very much about it. But five hundred men went down on her. I say those fellas are the heroes. We’re the lucky ones, that’s all.”
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At Pearl Harbor’s fiftieth anniversary ceremony in 1991, President George H. W. Bush, who had served in World War II as a navy pilot and had been shot down by the Japanese, told the two thousand survivors in the audience that it was time to move on: “I have no rancor in my heart toward Germany or Japan—none at all. I hope you have none in yours. This is no time for recrimination. World War Two is over. It is history. We won. Americans did not wage war against nations or races. We fought for freedom and human dignity against the nightmare of totalitarianism. We crushed totalitarianism, and when that was done, we helped our enemies give birth to democracies.”
At the ceremony, Ford Island’s A. M. Geiger teared up when asked if this would be his last trip to Pearl Harbor. “Don’t talk about that,” said Mr. Geiger, who walked with a cane and wore a pacemaker. “I don’t have any friends left.” “You never get over it: I’ve been crying,” said Salt Lake City’s Haile Jaekel. “But I’m going to keep coming till I drop.”
Japanese television produced a series of historical dramas and documentaries that year telling a very different story from the one Americans know. A typical and especially popular drama was Defeat in Showa 16, a tale in which ordinary citizens working with the Planning Board try to stop a small band of military hard-liners from driving the country to war. Blaming Hideki Tojo and his compatriots while absolving the great majority of Japanese citizens, though, sounds awfully similar to the 1950s German viewpoint that basically said, “It wasn’t us, it was Hitler.” When onetime deputy defense minister Seiki Nishihiro admitted, “Of course the military had much of the power, but the mass media and everyone else followed, so not only the military was responsible,” politician Masayuki Fujio countered, “Why should we fling mud at the history of Japan?”
Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe had hoped to honor the fiftieth anniversary in Hawaii by offering a “milestone” resolution of regret from Japan’s parliament, but the vote failed, with senior legislator Takashi Hasegawa explaining, “There is no need now for the loser to apologize to the victor.” Instead, Emperor Akihito expressed his regrets, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa said that his countrymen “feel a deep sense of responsibility for the unbearable damage and grief” that the war brought to the world, Foreign Minister Watanabe expressed “deep remorse about the unbearable suffering and sorrow,” and Hiroshima mayor Takashi Hiraoka visited Pearl Harbor to lay a wreath of solidarity. Japanese psychiatry professor Susumu Oda theorized that the country’s inability to take responsibility and make amends “relates to the mentality of ancestor worship. Some Japanese feel that it would be sinful to apologize for World War II, because they would be blaming their ancestors.”
I went to Japan to try to understand their side of this story. At the very center of Tokyo, surrounded by parkland, stands the low-slung Temple of Heaven, home to the emperor, and just up the street on a small hill overlooking the palace can be found a very different kind of building. Overseen by dozens of busy Shinto priests and attendant maidens dressed in stark red skirts and billowing white blouses, its grounds dotted by the brilliant white of its specially bred doves, Yasukuni-jinja (Empire at Peace Shrine) is perhaps the most controversial site in all of Japan. Fronted by two rows of ginkgo and cherry trees, the normal wooden torii gate here is bronze, while the temple’s entryway is draped in purple curtains marked in the facet emblem of the Chrysanthemum Throne—the emblem for which the 2,466,000 kami, “soldier-gods,” memorialized here sacrificed their lives. Supplicants appear before the cedar altar and honor the deities of departed soldiers by bowing and clapping their hands. In 1978, the urn of Tojo’s ashes, along with the remains of other Pacific war leaders hanged as war criminals, were clandestinely brought to Yasukuni to be housed in its inner sanctum. The Japanese believe that the world’s most beautiful sakura (“cherry blossoms,” whose brief and vivid blooms are symbols of fallen warriors) are found here.
Before Yasukuni’s entryway stands Yushukan—the Hall for Communing with Noble Souls—a museum surveying the country’s entire history of warfare concluding with the Great East Asia War. Inside are swords, maps, medals, an Ohka kamikaze cherry-blossom attack glider, various bits of Yamamoto memorabilia, a midget submarine, a Kaiten suicide torpedo, a carrier minibomber, a light tank, field guns, antiaircraft guns, and naval shells. Two rooms are dedicated to the six thousand suicide fliers who died in the war’s last days, with the highpoint a panorama of the Jinrai Butai, the Divine Thunderbolt Corps, in its final heroic moment—Okinawa.
Yushukan holds one of the four main Great East Asia War archives in Japan. The others are at Hiroshima, Kure, and Etajima. I was warmly received everywhere, as expected in the most gracious and hospitable nation on earth . . . except at the Imperial Japanese Naval History Museum of Etajima, which includes the school attended by every military figure on the Japanese side of this story. There, each time I or a Japanese trying to help me called to arrange a visit, we were given a different reason for why I couldn’t go. They were closed. They weren’t closed, but they weren’t for sightseers. Maybe I wasn’t a sightseer, but if so, I would need an appointment. No, they wouldn’t make an appointment since they couldn’t assist an English speaker. When I offered to bring my own translator, the response was that it didn’t matter, they were closed. It went round and round.
I showed up at Etajima anyway. People were working there, the lights were on, and the parking lot was busy. I asked to speak to someone in charge. Mr. Masuko appeared, and again he refused to let an American writer work at a Japanese history archive. I asked if, after seventy-five years, the Japanese navy was still fighting this war. Did they have something to hide? Before leaving, I told him that this is not how writers from his country are treated in the United States, and that he was an embarrassment to our nations’ friendship. I was angry at how the Etajima staff treated me, but at the same time, I know that, if American veterans of World War II have trouble talking about their wartime experiences, Japanese veterans are doubly afflicted since they lost. Yet there is a renewed interest among the Japanese about this history, and what levels of pride, and remorse, they should feel. Every Pacific-war museum I saw in Japan was mobbed.
On June 22, 2001, the Walt Disney Company rented the Tokyo Dome and invited the thirty thousand winners of a video-store lottery to watch the Japanese premiere of its movie Pearl Harbor. Disney’s newspaper ads
did not mention that all the villains were Japanese; they instead described the story as “The world starts moving; the world is caught in a tide of history. With hope for the future and love in their hearts, young heroes battle against the opposition of the times.” One lottery winner was nineteen-year old Chikako Inomata, who said, “It is normal that Pearl Harbor would be seen differently from a Japanese and an American viewpoint, but sometimes I felt a little bad that the Japanese people were simply portrayed as evil.” A thirteen-year-old, however, “was moved to tears at the point when Danny died. . . . I learned more about human relations than I did about history.” Disney’s Pearl Harbor was a hit in Japan, the country’s sixth-highest grosser at the time.
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In polls taken at Pearl Harbor’s fiftieth anniversary in 1991, 55 percent of the Japanese and 40 percent of the Americans thought that Japan should apologize for Pearl Harbor, while 73 percent of the Japanese and 16 percent of the Americans said that the United States should apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If Japan apologized for Pearl Harbor, though, 50 percent of the Americans thought the United States should then apologize for its atomic bombs. “Fifty years of pain and hatred is long enough; the time has come for reconciliation,” said Hawaii’s US senator Daniel K. Inouye at a Japan-America Society of Honolulu dinner on the fiftieth anniversary. (As a boy in Honolulu on December 7, when Japanese American Inouye learned who was behind the attack, he screamed, “You goddamn Japs!”) This anniversary took place when the American economy had sagged for two decades while Japan’s had soared. Southeast Asia and Hawaii were now financially dominated by the Japanese, whose businessmen worked to influence local politics. Americans of Japanese ancestry, known as AJAs in Hawaii, are now 23 percent of the population and wield tremendous power through grassroots politics and business investment. Similarly, 20 percent of Hawaii’s tourists are Japanese, but on average they spend five times as much as American tourists. Many in Europe saw that the Germans were behaving similarly on that continent and wondered, Were the losers of World War II now economically dominating the globe? By the nineties, Japan’s economic boom and her preference for American investments was a daily topic of conversation in the US business community, with rancor over Tokyo’s unequal trade protectionism. Her financial success was often referred to in the press as an economic Pearl Harbor, while the American reaction can be seen in the movie Rising Sun, with its immaculately suited villainous Japanese businessmen and talk of “financial samurai.”