BOOK MARK : Return to Pearl Harbor: Grudges Can Be Inherited

Before going to Hawaii, I had considered Pearl Harbor solely a military affair. Newsreels, photographs and books encouraged this by concentrating on what happened to military targets, and I imagined warships spewing fire, lines of planes exploding on the ground, gunners surrounded by rings of flame, and the band on the battleship California completing “The Star Spangled Banner” before breaking for cover. I pictured Marine officers emptying their revolvers at Zeros as tears ran down their cheeks, and admirals standing in their gardens, still wearing pajamas, staring in disbelief.

But what I had ignored or never understood was that this had all happened on the edge of Honolulu that has since become America’s 13th largest, one where 40% of the population in 1941 was the same race as the pilots of those dragonfly planes.

The 50th anniversary of a war is an urgent time for legacies and memories, a time when death has cut through the ranks of officers, leaving the memories of corporals and privates. It is a time when survivors seize a last chance to redress wrongs or reveal secrets. Fearing their battles and sacrifices are soon to be forgotten, they embark on a final binge of memorial unveiling and memoir writing, saying “Remember us. Remembers us! Remember!”

But remember what? Remember how? And how do they want us to remember their enemy? By perpetuating their grudges? Or should these disappear with the only generation with a right to them?

A 50th anniversary is also a transitional time: when the memory of a war generation coexists with the inherited memory of their children and the ignorance of their grandchildren; when you can begin discerning what the folk memory of a war will be; and when living memory still challenges sweeping conclusions. During this time, Pearl Harbor witnesses remember bullets stitching a sidewalk, and pilots flying so low they could be seen laughing or smiling. Then they stop, wondering, Did I really see this, or was it cribbed from a documentary? From someone else’s memory? From one of the famous photographs? Or from the movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” which for months in the mid-1960s was filmed across Oahu, corrupting local memory.

The Japanese have been a unique enemy in United States history, hated more than any other. Before going to Hawaii, I had thought the hostility easily explained. It was racism. It seemed simple: We had made our peace with Germany because it is a Caucasian nation, but we were still “bashing” Japan because they are Orientals; Japanese investment was resented because the Japanese were a former Asian enemy, but investment by Germans was not because they were Caucasian.

But in Hawaii, as I came to understand the unusual triangle of relationships among Americans, Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry, I saw it was not that simple.

I read, for instance, about a Pearl Harbor survivor protesting the use of a Japanese-made Komatsu backhoe to excavate an addition to the national cemetery that would one day hold his remains. “Is it too much to ask that this practice be stopped on the hallowed grounds of our national cemeteries?” he asked. “Do other Pearl Harbor survivors feel as I do? Does ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ mean anything today?” Here was a perfect example, I thought, of the excessive sensitivity of the older, wartime generation.

A few days later, however, I found myself in the shrine room of the Arizona Memorial, angry beyond all reason at a Japanese woman born at least a quarter century after a Japanese bomb had ignited the Arizona’s forward magazine, sinking it in nine minutes and killing 1,177 of its crew. I was reading the names of these dead crewmen carved on a marble wall, searching for the 17 sets of brothers, when I heard a whisper of “Please, sir . . . please, sir . . . please!” I turned to face a young Japanese woman wearing a pained smile. She waved the back of her hand, motioning me to move. She wanted to pose her sister in front of this list of dead sailors, and I was in the way. I shook my head. She asked again, raising her voice and becoming annoyed. I glared, folded my arms and turned my back. Her shutter went clickety-clack, and for a moment I considered grabbing that camera and exposing the film.

Let me be clear about this. Had she been American, British, Russian, Chinese or even German, I would have smiled and moved away, perhaps offering to take her picture in front of those names. At first, I put my reaction down to my age. I was born in 1946, in the earliest of the postwar generations, one that grew up listening to war stories and surrounded by German helmets, Japanese bayonets and the flight jackets we wore as teen-agers.

For us, bravery was defined by Omaha Beach, leadership by Winston Churchill, evil by the Holocaust and treachery by Pearl Harbor. The war we knew was immediate, its wounds raw, its issues simple. We were too close to it for historical perspective, too removed to understand its ironies or moral ambiguities. The movies we saw and the books we read were often wartime propaganda, but we were too young to separate the real from the bogus. And after watching all those black-and-white documentaries, reading those fat histories, and participating in those philosophical disputes that could never be argued without reference to Hitler, and after comparing our restless, unfulfilled generation with the one before it, perhaps it is not surprising we felt such secondhand nostalgia for a time we had never lived and a war we had never fought, nor surprising that my secondhand memories had become secondhand grudges.

BOOK REVIEW: “Pearl Harbor Ghosts: A Journey to Hawaii Then and Now,” by Thurston Clarke, is reviewed on Page 28 of the Book Review section.

PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE: A Japanese student, who briefly studied in the United States, tells how she views Pearl Harbor 50 years after the attack. Page 6.