Reflections on Pearl Harbor Anniversaries Past Roger Dingman University of Southern California
Reflections on Pearl Harbor Anniversaries Past Roger Dingman University of Southern California 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 mili- tary 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.
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