Okay, as briefly as I can muster:
Regarding Pat’s assessment, I’d say you are both right and wrong. While the Japanese are indeed less forgiving of failure than many other cultures, there are a couple of unique, wonderful qualities they possess that counterbalance this tendency. They are, 1. an unmatched talent in innovating and improving any product or situation they are given and 2. Keeping their chin up despite failure, and keeping it up until it doesn’t want to go down again. My guess is that every single Japanese you saw at Pearl Harbor had nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for America, and were genuinely interested in history, same a you or I would feel upon a tour through one of the Atomic Bomb museums in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I genuinely believe this.
But here’s where the gears switch. If you ever DO take a tour of one of those museums (located in Hiroshima and Nagasaki), you will be subjected to a what amounts to, at best, a palpably one-sided, hyper-emotive version of the story of what happened there, that seeks desperately to do everything it can to avoid ANY acceptance of responsibility for the role the Japanese military government had in the eventual culmination of those events. They are called the “Peace” museums, and they serve as the model for what is taught to kids in the schools pretty much from the moment they begin elementary school: The dropping of the atomic bombs was the worst thing that has ever occurred in the history of the world, and there can never, ever be anything worse.
All of that would not be so bad but for the complete gutting of all necessary CONTEXT as to HOW all of this came to pass and WHY those decisions were finally made. So a walk through one of the museums will leave the informed student of history with a strange feeling that something important is missing. A we make our way though the museum, we walk through a scale model of pre- and post-bomb Hiroshima that rather obnoxiously indicates the locations of elementary schools while leaving the munitions factories up to the observer’s imagination. And before moving on to the next exhibit, we have to pass the mannequin elementary students with their clothes melting into their skin, here a cute zombie girl stumbles through a hellishly lit wasteland, trailed by her dying mother. And before the next stop, a story, of the little girl who got radiation poisoning, who folded thousands of origami cranes as prayers in the hope she might recover, but she didn’t. And now the thousand million billion trillion I don’t know how many orgami cranes that are folded and strung into massive strings by the elementary students from every school, who are invariably brought to Hiroshima and the museum as one of their mandatory school trips, who are fed all of this stuff without ever a follow-up word as to why, WHY!!! it really happened.
I don’t have the time or space, but maybe this can give you some idea of why you cannot, 99% of the time, even begin to suggest that those bombs finally probably saved the lives of a huge swath of the Japanese poplulace at that time. Don’t you dare. Or why to this day Japan has major diplomatic issues with China and South Korea over its refusal to apologize for wartime atrocities, land disputes and other issues (to be fair, I feel that China and South Korea are probably at least equally guilty in intentionally stoking these fires).
And on the other hand, you have the Japanese far right-wing, who are the other EXTREME extreme of what I have just described, who scare the living shit out of me. I’ll throw a couple of youtube vids of them in the next post and just say that I have been in the middle of a couple of these “rallies” of theirs, and I did NOT feel the typical safe and comfortable feeling I usually have living here. These guys are who Japan was before the bombs, and they want nothing more than for Japan to become “that” Japan again.
