 Okay, we're back real live. We have a wonderful, serious discussion today with John David Ann, Professor of History at HBU. We're talking about Pearl Harbor Remembered. And indeed, today is the day that the Honourable Star Advertiser published a six-part section about the day of infamy. And in fact, you know, when you think about it, the word infamy seemed to be invented that day. And this was the day when, or immediately after, an FDR used the machinery available in those times to talk to the world, to talk to the American public. That's correct. That's correct. The whole thing was unprecedented. It was a turning point in history, wasn't it? And, you know, like this was really big, a sneak attack over thousands of miles using the most modern aircraft at the time and ships and carriers to achieve what was really an enormous, enormous advance in military and warfare. Yeah. And they pulled it off, and they did tremendous damage. And we're going to find out about the effect that this moment had on American history and world history. Right. How big is it in terms of the 20th century? Well, it's been remembered as the moment in American history. I mean, really, I mean, we were just talking before the show about the 9-11 attacks and how, after the 9-11 attacks, George W. Bush, president then, used Pearl Harbor as a metaphor for how we could pick ourselves up after we were beaten down and successfully beat the enemy. So, of course, it's a more complicated situation. We haven't beaten the terrorists, at least not yet. But so, in our memory, it's the moment of the 20th century. The thing is, the Japanese attack was very successful, but it wasn't that successful. Not in the long term. That's right. In the course of the war, it was, of course, it was a surprise, and it was a great blow against the American fleet. But most of the battleships that were hit in Pearl Harbor were actually refloated within six months. Is that right? Yeah. So, there were only a couple. The Arizona, and I think it was the Oklahoma that turned turtle. You couldn't refloat that one, and they had to cut that up. But this, to me, the great significance of this is that it's all about humanity. It's all about people getting excited. It's all about people putting their resources, their time, their energy, their driving force in life to a cause. And I go back to the conspiratorical theory. We talked about that. Roosevelt knew. This was either the greatest intelligence blunder, or maybe not. It was not an intelligence blunder. It was a strategic moment. He knew about it, and he knew that if he wanted to have a real war with them, he'd have to galvanize the American public. So, it was like he didn't do anything, essentially inviting them in, and then he used that in order to make a tremendous war effort here. Yeah. So, there have been these conspiracy theories from the day that Pearl Harbor attack happened. And actually, a famous American historian, Charles Beard, actually wrote a book about this in 1948 and argued that FDR did in fact know about the upcoming attack on Pearl Harbor, and yet he refused to tell the American public, we really don't have any evidence that that was the case. And Beard was really heavily criticized. Honestly, it ruined Charles Beard's career to have written that book and take the criticism that he made. Unpatriotic thing. Yeah, it was both unpatriotic, but his evidence was real thin. He was saying there were these communiques to consulates, to the consulate in Hawaii to be prepared for an attack, but these communiques were sent to all of the consulates. So, it was just a poor piece of scholarship, I hate to say, for a very, really a tremendous historian who had a great career, but it was ruined by this conspiracy. And yet, we had the sinking of the main. Yeah. We had the Tonkin Gulf incident. Right. And these all have the feeling of being fabrications that led to aggressive decisions. Yeah, yeah. Well, and of course, after bringing up the 9-11 attacks, actually, if we could look at picture number six, which is a picture of George, this is a photograph of George W. Bush giving his first major speech after the 9-11 attacks. This was given to Congress on September 20, 2001. And in the audience, Tom Brokaw, who was the commentator, the NBC commentator, and then he had Stephen Ambrose, a major historian, sitting right next to him, they were talking about the significance of Pearl Harbor as a way of thinking about the 9-11 attacks. So again, this idea that you could recover from the attacks, that it would mobilize the American people, unite them, just like Pearl Harbor had done, and then we would eventually beat the bad guys. And that's what happened. So Pearl Harbor stands, I'm taking from what you said, Pearl Harbor stands as an infamous day, but they have a sneak attack, the ultimate sneakiness, and also stands as something that galvanized the American nation into man, woman, and children, all on the same page for years. And this, of course, was a miscalculation on the part of the Japanese who believed that they could, what the Japanese needed to do strategically was take out the American fleet. That way, they could have an unimpeded access to Southeast Asia when they invaded Southeast Asia a few months later. And of course, they took over all of Southeast Asia within six months. They were in the Philippines, Singapore, Burma, even the eastern part of India. They were worried we would stop them. They were worried about a flank attack on their fleet and their troops as they were going down into Southeast Asia. So they took out the American fleet. It certainly helped them into that invasion, but it was very short-lived. In May 1941, of course, the Battle of Midway, the United States actually sunk four of the six Japanese aircraft carriers. And that was really the high point of the Japanese Empire. May 1941, only six months after Pearl Harbor. So from there on, the Japanese were fighting this defensive battle. 1942. 1942, pardon me. The Japanese were fighting this defensive battle, trying to keep what they had captured in December 1941. So yes, it mobilized the American nation to a tremendous extent. And it certainly helped us to win the war, win the Pacific War. It's fascinating the way it's been remembered during World War II. And if we can have, let's see, that would be picture number two, I think. Yes, so some of the ways that Pearl Harbor was remembered was as a very, a dastardly attack. And it was commemorated that it justified the nastiness of it and the violence of it justified our own violence. And so this is actually a photograph. This is the front page of Life Magazine in 1944. And this is actually the skull of a Japanese soldier that the boyfriend of this woman in the photograph had sent to her as a gift. Oh, what a gift. Yeah, I mean, you know, that's true love for you, right? But that shows you the anger. It was a violent race war. And there was no quarter given. Americans strafed Japanese lifeboats. Japanese did suicide attacks on American ships. It was the nastiest of wars. Compare it with World War I. Was it nastier? Oh, yeah. Interesting. Yes, yes. You were out to kill everyone in sight. That's correct. And again, there were times when the Americans captured troops, when they took no quarter and they simply massacred the troops. And there were times when the Japanese took American troops prisoner and they showed no quarter and just killed everyone. And this came out of the Pearl Harbor. This was a payback. We're really ticked off. That's what the Americans used to justify their payback. So there was a viciousness in a kind of racial identification about the Japanese as a yellow race that was a yellow race dangerous, backstabbers. You couldn't trust this race of people. So it led to all kinds of stereotypes about the Japanese. And the fascinating thing is, of course, after the war with the American occupation of Japan, then those stereotypes changed very quickly to a kind of positive. The Japanese guerrilla, right, this was one of the ways that the Japanese were portrayed, became a harmless Japanese monkey sitting on the soldier of a GI. That's how it's portrayed in the magazine Leatherneck. At the end, in the September edition of Leatherneck, that's how it's portrayed. Yeah, that's right. Well, we were ticked off enough to put people in camps, and these characterizations, these profilings that you talk about, they were complete. I mean, every Japanese, with very few exceptions, was suspect in this country. That's correct, that's correct. Even American citizens. No, that's right. So just some background on what the Japanese actually did before Pearl Harbor, too, in terms of intelligence work. What we know is that there was one person in charge of intelligence gathering in Honolulu, and he was an officer with the Japanese consulate. And he would go out, he would visit local bars, and he would go out and surveil Pearl Harbor itself. And the local bars, of course, to get information surreptitiously from locals about ship positions and such. So we don't really, we don't have any evidence that the local Japanese American population was involved in spying. None. If he was with the consulate, then it was his job to gather information. And he was not a Japanese American. He was a Japanese citizen and a Japanese national. So you can't say that's spying. It's not really spying. No, it was doing intelligence work for his government, what he was hired to do. So, yeah, and I've heard that story, but I guess the only indication is this one guy, and all the other myths about Japanese sympathizers who had information back. Japanese fishing boats in the harbor, you know, radioing back to, yeah. That's part of the commemoration of Pearl Harbor during the war is that mythology is created along with Japanese internment and the kind of the demonization of the Japanese American population in the United States. So that's kind of, that's a low point, of course, of the Pacific War for the United States. And it must have led to, you know, what happened at the end with the bomb. Must have led, must have been some influence on Truman when he made that decision. Absolutely. I mean, there was definitely a sense that Pearl Harbor had to be paid back, that it justified, you know, revenge against the Japanese or extreme punishment of the Japanese, and certainly the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima qualifies with atomic weapons. It's a whole moral episode. It's a drama. Yeah. You know, you have somebody who does something really bad, and this is seen, this is in American art. It's, you know, it's really deep, deep in our culture. It's something that does something bad, and now you pay them back, and then the score is even. That's correct. After two bombs. Yeah. I suppose in a way. Now, it's interesting because in the post-war period, we have remembered Pearl Harbor in a variety of ways. And I think this is picture five. Yeah, so this is a picture of that famous movie Torotoro, which was produced in 1970, released in 1970. And of course, this is a representation of the Japanese military leadership, the bad guys, and yet they don't seem so bad in this movie. So what we saw is an evolution from the immediate post-war period to very negative representations to a time period in the 1970s when our representation of the Japanese was actually respectful of their valor and their success at Pearl Harbor. Well, the occupation was successful. The occupation changed that way of looking at them. That's correct. Yeah. I mean, GIs brought home Japanese wives. We felt pride in the fact that the Japanese nation had become successful economically once again, was a functioning democracy. So yeah, we definitely felt some pride in the occupation. And so I think that definitely helped. Hawaii somehow is a gauge on all of this, because Hawaii was the place of tax. That's right. And Hawaii wound up, well, it already had from the plantations and otherwise had a huge number of Japanese here. That's correct. And Hawaii sort of came together. By 1970, Hawaii was a polyglot, a lot of into marriage, and the Japanese held many, many positions. They were part of it, and the Japanese tourists were starting to come. So the whole thing had turned into a positive experience. That's exactly right. And that positive feeling towards Pearl Harbor and the Pearl Harbor legacy and the Japanese lasts until the late 1980s, when the Japanese economy is revving very high and actually beginning to challenge the American economy. So it changed that. It did change. After this break, John, I want to talk about exactly what happened and how that has fed forward till now. Wow. John David Ann, Professor of History at HPU, we're talking about Pearl Harbor remembered in only a few days away from December 7th. We'll be right back. Aloha, I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. Start your powhuna weekend off with the show where I talk to people about issues pertinent to Hawaii. You can see my previous shows at my blog, kauilukas.com, and also on Think Tech's show. Sorry. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Law Across the Sea. Join me every other Monday when we bring lawyers who know how to get across the sea to meet people and resolve problems into your house. Thank you. You wish you were here during the break because John and I just keep on going. So, you know, the Torah Torah, 1970, was not the only movie. That's right. And movies, in fact, they reflect public feelings. They reflect what Hollywood wants, the things how people want, and they affect public feelings. So what was happening in movie them in that period? Right. So famous director Frank Capra took on the, he actually was offered the contract by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which was essentially the arm of intelligence to do a film about Pearl Harbor. So Capra did this film, the first film on Pearl Harbor in 1942. And then, yeah, and that's one of the other films that Frank Capra did. And these films during the war were patriotic films. They were anti-Japanese. They demonized the Japanese. Apaganda. And yeah, I mean, essentially, they were, you said it, but no, that's true. They were persuasive. And so, you know, the facts suffer when you have persuasive films like this. But after the war, of course, there was a series, a TV series, called Victory at Sea. I remember that. I think that was also done by Capra. And that was a more positive portrayal. By the 1950s, we could, with the occupation, we could begin to see the Japanese as not quite so evil. They were producing electronics, covering the U.S. and the world. Sony had, there's a book, by the way, called Pacific. I have cameras running right now, but he worked at the East West Center. He was in there a long time. And his recent book, it's a very interesting book, and one of the chapters in this book is... Oh, Simon Winchester. That's it, Simon Winchester. It's a great book. A great book. And one of them was all about Sony, and then Sony emerged. That's exactly right. So there is another film done in 1958, called The Barbarian in the Geisha, and it features John Wayne and a Japanese actress. And John Wayne is, he takes the role as Townsend Harris, who was the first American consul to Japan stationed in 1858. So you have the 100-year anniversary of this, of the treaty with the Japanese and this consul. And these two have this love relationship, and it's a hilarious film. But it's interesting because by 1958, then the Americans could see Japan in a much more positive light. So that Pearl Harbor memory had begun to transform. Transformed again in the 80s, and then since the 90s, it's transformed again with the... In a couple of days, the Pearl Harbor Association will have a celebration, and that will actually... There might be some Japanese veterans there from the attack. So there's been this reconciliation, which has aided in kind of healing the wounds and healing the memory of Pearl Harbor between American veterans and Japanese veterans. Quite remarkable. A couple of years ago, we went down... I think that went down with cameras to Pearl Harbor. And they had, I think it was the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. That would have been in 2015. And she was so interesting that there was a Japanese mayor there from a city, a sort of sister city, and they came and they talked about reconciliation and swore eternal loyalty and faithfulness and aloha to each other. It was very touching. And to me, I hadn't realized that it had gone that far, but it has. No, absolutely. Now in 1991, when this was proposed by a former fighter pilot from the Japanese squadron that bombed Pearl Harbor, a guy who actually became a Christian, became a Christian pastor, moved to Seattle and was in Seattle. He proposed this, this kind of reunion with US and Japanese soldiers or veterans. The president at that time, George Herbert Walker Bush, was outraged. He refused to allow it to happen. And he traveled to Pearl Harbor and gave, I think, two or three speeches. He didn't demonize the Japanese in 1991. He did not. But he talked about the valor of the American troops in the Pearl Harbor attack. So there was still that kind of Japanese as a superpower, kind of tension between the United States and Japan. And but eventually these reunions were allowed to happen by the mid-1990s. And while that was happening, we were having issues with other countries in Asia. And it just seemed, I think it seemed to the American public that Japan was our best friend in Asia. And that has to feed into it. Yes, definitely today we see Japan as a staunch ally. And the thing is, though, Americans still celebrate Pearl Harbor as if it happened yesterday. So and there are some parts of the country where there's still some anti-Japanese feeling in the United States. So it's definitely, the relationship is a very strong alliance. But Pearl Harbor still lives. Well, it stands for something in the American mentality, certainly in a historical context. And I guess the question I would put to you, John, is, you know, they say to George Santayana, you know, we should study it so we can learn by what can we learn? We as a nation and the world for that matter, what can we learn from Pearl Harbor? Right. Well, I think we can learn about World War II. The fact that we commemorate Pearl Harbor, as we do, I think tells us that we yearn for some sort of a collective identity. Honestly, I think that's probably at a deeper kind of collective psychological level than anything else is Pearl Harbor brought us together. And before Pearl Harbor, the Alamo brought us together. And Custer's defeat brought us together in mythical ways. I mean, you know, the histories that come out of this are many times not factually accurate. But the yearning for a stronger collective identity is something which Pearl Harbor represents for the American people. And I think it's a kind of patriotism. It's kind of nationalism that Americans yearn for. And they say we're returning to that now, not only the U.S. but other places in the world are returning to nationalism and it plays into that. But we're deeply divided. I think that's the, I think that's part of where the yearning comes from is we're so divided as a nation right now that it's hard to imagine us being, you know, all patriotic in the same way. So Pearl Harbor is something that can kind of bridge that completely together. So can Pearl Harbor, you know, with the modern communications technology, with social media, with the way we've seen Donald Trump change politics, change the country using Twitter, imagine that. And, you know, the way Putin made his advance into Ukraine. It was a pretty tricky business. There was no sneak attack there. He managed the news. And so at the end of the day he said, well, maybe he has a reason to go in there. We're not sure. It's not clear. We can't galvanize, you know, NATO about this. We can't galvanize the world about it. And he knew that. He played that. So my question to you is, can there ever be another, you know, with those considerations, can there ever be another sneak attack which galvanizes a nation virtually overnight? Can it happen? Oh, yeah, I think so. Yes. I think if we had another major terrorist attack like 9-11, I mean, you look at, you know, after 9-11, by 2003 when we invaded Iraq, George W. Bush's approval ratings were in the high 80s. You know, 10 percent of Americans were opposed. So that worked to kind of galvanize the public towards a very kind of patriotic feeling, but it didn't last very long. I think the one thing about, the one way to think about this is that it could happen in the future and it could galvanize the American public in the future, but the days of the kind of the peak of American nationalism is long past. So if it does galvanize the American public, it will be a short-term thing, relatively speaking. I think the impact of globalization and so, you know, people's identities are much more diffused now than they were in World War II. I don't think that at least in the foreseeable future, American nationalism is at the same strength that it was in World War II. And I don't think we can be brought back. The greatest generation. Yeah, that's right. That was really a terrific time in many ways. So the other thing is, I keep thinking of Waterloo. Waterloo was a historic event of great maggots. It was great loss for Napoleon and all that. He met his Waterloo with part of the language around Europe and around the U.S. And what it reflects to me is the passage of time kind of smooths all this out. So we have, we have today, we have a six-part series here in a section in the Honolulu Star Advertiser. And I would venture to say that although you and I have a certain recollection of the intensity of this event, I think, you know, people coming up now, going through school now, studying history, as they may or may not do, are going to have much less sensitivity to it. And after a time it becomes nomenclature and no more than that. Yeah. Well, I don't see that happening with Pearl Harbor. One of the things is that they do a great job at the Pearl Harbor, at the USS Arizona Memorial of bringing people through and educating them. And one of the things that's very interesting about the Pearl Harbor Memorial there is the film that you have to see before you go out. Interesting. Yeah. So that film, originally the film that was shown was a film from the early 1980s, which portrayed the Japanese invasion as quite successful. And the Japanese is honorable. And of course, people didn't like that. So that was pulled. The current film, which has been in place since 1991, is a film in which the narrator, Stockard Channing, pardon me, she talks about the sacrifice. And she doesn't say American sacrifice. She says mourn the dead, respect their valor. And she doesn't say Americans or Japanese. It's universal. So the Park Service themselves have been able to universalize the experience of Pearl Harbor in a way that makes it okay for Japanese teenagers to come and visit, you know, American, older Americans, other, you know, people from all over the world to come and visit the memorial and get something out of that film and that memorial. So it's really a fascinating thing to think about that Pearl Harbor has actually been globalized. Yes. Yes. In universalized. And it stands iconic into a thousand feet tall. And it is right square in the middle of our state and our island. That's right. And it has defined Hawaii in so many ways, we may forget, but indeed, it's all around. It's not only punch pole. And collectively, those things are like the cemeteries in northern France. They stand a thousand feet tall. And they are. The other interesting thing if we have time, the other interesting thing is that Pearl Harbor was not a memorial immediately after the war. It took 15 years, 17 years, actually, for Pearl Harbor to become a nationally recognized memorial. And the Pearl Harbor Association had a terrible time raising money for it. There was not that much interest in commemoration of Pearl Harbor in the early days after the war. So it was open in 1962. But they had the Pearl Harbor Association that the Congress refused to give the money to finish the fundraising. They actually had to wait a couple of years to open it to raise the rest of the funds privately. So it's interesting how this Pearl Harbor kind of industry has grown. And I think in some ways it is an industry. We have to be a little bit skeptical that, you know, we get these kind of, you know, oh, pitter-patter feelings in our heart when we think of Pearl Harbor, but it is, it's a tremendous industry out there. It's a tremendous industry for Hawaii. Yeah, not only for the American side, but the Japanese side. That's correct. That's correct. John David and Professor of History at HPU, Pearl Harbor, remember, thank you so much, John. You're welcome, Jay. Aloha.