Reflections on Pearl Harbor Anniversaries Past Roger Dingman University of Southern California

Home , December 1942

By any measure, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was one of the decisive events of the twentieth century. For Americans, it was the greatest military disaster in memory-one which set them on the road to becoming the world's greatest military power. For Japanese, the attack was a momentary triumph that marked the beginning of their nation's painful and protracted transition from empire to economic colossus. Thus it is entirely appropriate, more than fifty years after the Pearl Harbor attack, to pause and consider the meaning of that event. One useful way of doing so is to look back on Pearl Harbor anniversaries past. For in public life, no less than in private, anniversaries can tell us where we are; prompt reflections on where we have been; and make us think about where we may be going. Indeed, because they are occa- sions that demand decisions by government officials and media man- agers and prompt responses by ordinary citizens about the relationship between past and present, anniversaries provide valuable insights into the forces that have shaped Japanese-American relations since 1941. On the first Pearl Harbor anniversary in December 1942, Japanese and Americans looked back on the attack in very different ways. In Tokyo, Professor Kamikawa Hikomatsu, one of Japan's most distin- guished historians of international affairs, published a newspaper ar- ticle that defended the attack as a legally and morally justifiable act of self-defense. Surrounded by enemies that exerted unrelenting military and economic pressure on it, and confronted by an America that refused accommodation through negotiation, Japan had had no choice but to strike.' On Guadalcanal, where they were locked in their first protracted battle against Japanese troops, Americans mounted a "hate shoot" against them to memorialize those who had died at Pearl Har- bor a year earlier.2 In Honolulu, the Advertiser editorial writer urged

The ]journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Fall 1994) © Copyright 1994 by Imprint Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Japan Times and Advertiser (Nippon Times from 8 December 1942 onward), 5 Dec. 1942. That same day, Foreign Minister Tani Masayuki in a speech that avoided all men- tion of the Pearl Harbor attack proclaimed that American "demands" had caused the war. See ibid., 6 Dec. 1942. 2. Donald F. Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains Catholic Priests in World War 11 (Lawrence, Kans.,1994), 49. 279 his readers not to make 7 December an occasion for any special obser- vance but to mark it as the "first milestone on the road to Tokyo."3 In Washington on the eve of that first anniversary, the Navy Department released statistics that for the first time confirmed the magnitude of American losses.4 Those grim facts taught a "lesson" that speakers all over the country sounded again and again: "Never again!" Americans must show the world, through their efforts on the battlefield and in the workplace, that any attack upon them could only result in defeat and disaster for those who perpetrated it.5 These strikingly different responses betrayed a common pattern that would repeat itself through, and beyond, the war years: Governments used the Pearl Harbor anniversary for their own purposes, tuning it to their perceptions of what relations between Japan and the United States demanded. In Japan, 8 December became a day devoted to unit- ing the nation in support of the sacrifices that war required.6 In the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declined to transform what he had called "a day of infamy" into the "Armed Forces Honor Day" that Congress proposed .7 To do so might soften the sting and blur memories of the enemy attack. Instead, his subordinates, with the help of the media, used those memories to spur American work- ers on to increase productivity on farms and factories. In the summer of 1945, as the war against Japan drew to its increas- ingly bloody close, President Harry S Truman used memories of the first Japanese attack against Americans to justify the nature of his country's last apocalyptic acts against Japan. On 6 August, when the world's first atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, he reminded his country- men that "the Japanese began the war in the air at Pearl Harbor." Three days later, he announced that a second atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki "against those who attacked without warning at Pearl Harbor."' Those few words were not mere reminders of how the war had begun but rather a tit-for-tat justification of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. In time, the linkage the president made between the attacks of December 1941 and August 1946 would return to haunt the U.S.-Japan relationship.

3. Honolulu Advertiser, 7 Dec. 1942, cited in Edward T. Lininthal, Sacred Ground Ameri- cans and Their Battlefields (Urbana, Ill.,1991),178. 4. Los Angeles Times, 6 Dec. 1942. 5. New York Times and Los Angeles Times, 7-8 Dec. 1942; Time, 7 Dec. 1942, 21, 30-40; ibid., 14 Dec. 1942, 27. 6. Theodore F. Cook, Jr., "Tokyo, December 8,1941," Military History Quarterly 4 (Au- tumn 1991): 35. 7. Samuel I. Rosenman, comp., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, llolume 12, 1943 (New York, 1950), 528-29; Time, 13 Dec. 1942,17. 8. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S Truman 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1961), 197, 212.