Category: Honolulu

One morning we hiked up Diamond Head, a medium-sized mountain in Honolulu. It was packed with tourists which made it hard to hike up and down the mountain. I took some pictures at the top of the mountain.

Here are some of them:

I hadn’t really realized what a good historian Tim is. I asked Misha if we should have him be our guide in Pearl Harbor, or do a tour. Laughing, she said, “Well, he already corrected one of the facts on the summary of the tour, so I think maybe we should just listen to him.” We took a taxi across town and he lined us up in front of some sign with pictures on it. He started to tell us about Japan and the US, and the Pacific. And it was HOT! After a couple minutes we moved to the shade – and I’m glad we did, because we were there, talking, for an hour!

So let’s see how much I learned. I’m going to try to recap what I gathered from our history lesson…. Tim explained Japan had a modern army, had learned from the French, Germans and Prussians how to do modern warfare – and were systematically taking over the APAC region. Manchuria, China, and on and on. Their Samurai warrior class demonstrated Japan had a deep history of warfare and knew how to fight.

The Japanese had allied with the Nazis, and when the Nazis conquered the French, Germany put their own governments into French Indochina. Japan had wanted those territories for a long time, and after Germany took away France’s authority in those areas, Japan thought it was a good time to go try to take control of French Indochina, and expand their empire further into the South Pacific. The US, who had been supplying a lot of oil to Japan, didn’t like the idea of Japan getting so large in the Pacific area. So, the US government stopped selling oil to Japan in order to slow the expansion of the Japanese empire. We also moved our Pacific fleet to Hawaii in preparation to defend our Pacific territories like the Philippines and Midway Island.

The Japanese had seen examples of successful surprise air raids to take out an opponent’s forces (can’t remember where), and adopted this idea for Pearl Harbor. They were afraid the US would not let them expand their empire, so the Japanese military planned a surprise attack on the naval forces in Pearl Harbor. They thought a weakened US military would give them a few years’ time to accomplish their goals. They also thought the US might get demoralized from the attacks and sign a treaty with Japan after being so badly wounded. Unfortunately for Japan, the opposite happened. The event formally launched the US into the war, and less than 4 years later, our country dropped two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They suffered four hundred thousand casualties for the ~3,000 they inflicted on us. Woah. They surrendered the war because they feared the extinction of the Japanese race — their first surrender in the two thousand year history of their people.

I asked Tim why the US occupied the Pacific region in the first place. Why did the US care what Japan was up to in the first place? Why did the US government send all out troops out to Hawaii and threaten them? I noticed he didn’t really talk about it, and the movies at Pearl Harbor didn’t either. He mentioned it would not be discussed at the memorial because a critique of war would be too painful and too sensitive a topic to discuss; people could only bear to remember their lost ones. But he got into it a bit. Tim explained we were allied with the French and Great Britain, so the Nazis were the enemies of our friends. This made Japan our enemy by association. But larger issues of colonialism were also at play, and the US were colonialists too. The US controlled Midway Island, the Marshall Islands, Hawaii, the Philippines, etc. And the US didn’t like the idea of Japan being a colonial power there too. Tim explained there existed really deep seated racism against Asians in the US in those days (really still, but it’s not as strong today, especially where I have lived). He mentioned tariffs and other exclusionary practices specifically aimed at Asian nations and said he thought it stemmed from deep seated bigotry that was common among Americans. We didn’t like the idea of an Asian superpower. I guess maybe that notion has not changed entirely, despite over 75 years since the start of the war. Some progress, but probably not enough.

The girls were great listeners. After the lesson we headed in to the park and miraculously got walk-in tickets, despite it being after 11 am already. We spent some time looking at the USS Missouri and having a quick guided tour there before watching the memorial movie. The movie consistently put images to many of the things Tim had already taught us, and added a rather somber tone of loss to the experience, a reminder we were about to see a war memorial. Then we embarked on a short boat ride to the memorial, a hauntingly simple and tasteful hallway slumped over the USS Arizona which it commemorated. We spent our time there, considered the ship sunken beneath us, the names of the dead engraved on the wall, the throngs of tourists around us, and the gentle Hawaiian breeze that tempered the blistering heat. And then we ambled back to the boat, back to land, off of the naval base, and back to a hopefully peace-full world ahead of us.