I start out by featuring a piece of fine china manufactured in "Occupied Japan." I was fortunate enough, some seven years ago to stumble on an eight piece set of this particular pattern. When I asked the price, I was stunned and dismayed at the same time. It showed that there is so little appreciation for this distinctive piece of history. I bought the set. I ignored the sign-up list at the stores mentioned on the invitation to my son's wedding. Instead, I gave him and his wife the set. There it will be assured of a long life of admiration showered upon it by a family that appreciates it.
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I was nine years old on August 6, 1945. It was a Monday. I went to my friend's house to play and he and the older members of our group were talking about atomic bombs. They mentioned that one had been dropped on Japan. No one had any idea of what an atomic bomb is and what it could do. All I heard was that it was so big that the war would not last much longer. That was true. It didn't.
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The years of my growing up were really interesting from the point of view of what we read and heard about the peoples of the world. Everything was a caricature. The beginning of hostilities had begun in Europe, around 1939, the year after my birth. Two years later, December 7, Pearl Harbor! My father worked for a manufacturing plant that made aircraft engines. He worked seven days per week for quite a few years. He was a person with a "minor" disability and he was an intelligent and effective leader. He was one of a minority of men who had to teach the newly recruited women the technicalities of operating metal working machinery (lathes, milling machines, grinders and drill presses). He had to teach them how to read micrometers and how to use slide rules and calipers. Together they formed a team that spent more time together than with their children.
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Little did we know [or care?] that similar team work was the order of the day 10,000 miles away. We did know that they had an airplane that was better than any of ours, so far. We did know that they were fierce and valiant fighters, but we always downplayed that part of it. At our age, we watched the front page pictures and didn't pay any attention to the politics. Reading the names of the places that were in the news was too difficult at that age. We knew Tokyo. That's all we had to know. We also knew who the enemy was and what to call him. Little did we care that he had a mother and siblings. At that time and at that age, we didn't even know, or care, that he perhaps had loved ones who were American citizens. I was deep into adulthood when I finally heard of the scandalous rounding up and dispossessing of Japanese people living and producing on American soil to commit them to detention camps. I still can't get over it.
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I grew up and my first adult work assignment was in the Philippines. I arrived there a mere twenty years after the end of the war. I could not calm my heart with the attitude of the people of this fine island nation. It was difficult to meet such negativity after seeing it be cured in North America. We had taught ourselves to speak in civil terms about the people of Japan. They even had set up important business enterprises in the United States and Mexico. Even Filipinos were driving Japanese cars and trucks all over Manila and in the hinterlands. They were benefiting from Japanese engineering expertise, but I was shocked at the slow recovery from the hatred.
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I then came back home to the United States. I went to work for Kyocera International, founded by Kazuo Inamori. I was a manager and the Japanese were my superiors. They had me in their houses and they came to mine. My wife and I sheltered some of their friends and their children while on vacation. My children developed serious friendships with children whose grandparents had spent time in the detention camps of Arizona. I taught English, as a Berlitz teacher, to Japanese doctors and other professionals. I helped a Japanese physicist to write a presentation white paper for a scientific talk about plasma. The scientist had survived the Hiroshima event. His body was deformed in many places with rather strange swellings, bends and bumps, but his brain was a bomb in and of itself. He is the only one who ever bared his soul to me about the Bomb and its after effects. In a nutshell, "I'm glad to be alive and to have achieved international reputation for my country."
One doctor was too young to have been affected. His wife was a nurse. She spent a lot of time at our home teaching my wife how to cope with a new baby and the foibles of new babies. We still sleep under the comforter that she left as a souvenir.
You have to admire the Japanese. They lost the guns and armor war, but they have won plenty in the economic, sports, art and culture wars. It's been a long time since they have stopped producing fine china produced in occupied Japan. Now, they produce fine autos in "occupied America." :-)
The one thing they did that makes me smile every time I see one, is that they traded-in that world class fighter plane for nice automobiles that they sell to Americans without firing a single shot. Not a single shot. ZERO!
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Finally, we have learned that the Japanese are indomitable. From them, as from the Jews, we have learned that it is impossible to completely destroy a people. The Japanese picked themselves up, stuck together, put themselves to work, even through occupation and rebuilt and excelled. Anyone who can do what they did after having to swallow a bomb-sized piece of humble pie deserves huge amounts of respect. To this day the Japanese people live under a charter that has tones of what happened in 1945. They do it, they live by it and their discipline in life is absolutely admirable. I am proud to say that I have loyal Japanese friends.
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