真珠湾攻撃の日

Pearl Harbor Day

As I mentioned yesterday, my blog sometimes makes mention of calendar. Today (Hawaii time: December 7, 1941; Japan time: December 8) we willy-nilly recall “Remember Pearl Harbor!” But in what sense? There are many meanings of the remembrance of the attack on Pearl Harbor: for the Americans, for the Japanese, and for the Japanese-Americans.

American TV news cites “Day of Infamy” (http://www.umkc.edu/lib/spec-col/ww2/PearlHarbor/fdr-speech.htm)　from morning till night. KTLA (Los Angeles) Prime News reported that the former P.O.W. in the Philippines will take action to sue the Japanese Government and Japanese companies for physical and mental damages. News media of Japanese-Americans keep silent today because today is not the day to speak about Manzanar and Heart Mountain (the major forced relocation centers of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during WWII).

Strangely enough, however, some Japanese people (n.b.: most of them are not Japanese-Americans but pure [?]Japanese who live in the US as permanent residents) in LA recently held a meeting for critical evaluation of the Tokyo Trials (International Military Tribunal for the Far East). Thanks to one of my friends who participated in the meeting, I heard their trend toward anti-American readings of history. As Japanese they still live in America and hate America.

Anyway, I do not like political calendar . . .