When I was a young boy during the Second World War, the Japanese people were considered by most, if not all Americans, as sneaky, cruel and hateful. As youth we called them, ‘yellow japs’. I Remember Pearl Harbor, the day the Japanese Navy unexpectedly bombed US Navy ships, with many sailors still on board. I was seven years old and my parents’ concerns were my concerns. We had not been at war with them and it seemingly came out of the blue. The United States was unready for war, even before we lost half of our war ships at Pearl Harbor. It was a very bad time in the history of this country. We were eventually fighting two wars: one in the Pacific war zone and another on the European side of the Atlantic Ocean. The Germans were invading their European neighbors with the hope and the object of conquering the world. As a young boy, my friends and I grew up hating Japs and Nazi’s (Germans). We were always fearful that we and our allies might be losing to the enemy across the Pacific or those across the Atlantic. Our parents were reading the papers every night and had their ears to the radio to find out where and who was winning the battles. Walter Cronkite and other war correspondents were trying their best to keep us informed. The ‘soldier death’ count was usually shared on a daily basis. Mother had four brothers in the Navy and in the Army and it was always a concern that they might be killed or wounded somewhere. We didn’t always know where they were. From 1941 to 1945 this terrible war, on our little planet, raged on and we and our allies were finally victorious. While soldiers and sailors fought real battles, young boys like me, were ready to go when ever we might be called. We didn’t play cops and robbers like kids during peacetime, we played army soldiers and we were either killing Japs or Nazis. The war was devastating as many communities and even countries, around the world, were depleting their resources and materials normally used for manufacturing peacetime goods. Every valuable resource was used to supply the Army and Navy with equipment to fight the war. After the war, the cities and towns in Europe and Japan were practically destroyed and then the ‘magnanimous Americans’ who started neither of those conflicts, but who won them both, helped to rebuild all of those devastated countries, including Japan and Germany. That, my friends, is why this is the greatest country in the whole wide world and always will be. Our military returned with honor but the body count was huge. God bless them! A goodly portion of our civilian population lost a uniformed member of their family.
The day Japan surrendered, in 1945, I was eleven years old and selling newspapers after school on a street corner in Spokane, Washington. My papers were sold in minutes and a grown woman grabbed me and kissed me on my lips, everybody was so happy. And I had something to brag about for days, after all I had never been kissed before, let alone by an adult woman.
The Japanese society today is very different, they place a great deal of value on honor and respect and being able to hold your head high. In Japan, stealing not only disgraces an individual but their whole family, as well. Japanese people also have respect for authority; they are obedient, and exercise self-discipline. They have respect for property even in the middle of disaster. When the Fukushima nuclear power plant failed after being struck by a tsunami in 2011, there was no looting, and that is quite unusual among human cultures. The evacuated homes and their contents were safe. The site is on Japan’s Pacific coast, in northeastern Fukushima, about (60 miles) south of Sendai. The landscape of that part of Japan looked like the aftermath of World War Two. In other countries that have experienced similar disasters there have always been widespread looting, but not in Japan
In the United States, people in general, try to be honest and honorable. Why there are some of us who are prone to steal and take advantage of others and their property is hard to understand. I feel confident that parents generally teach their children to be honest and have respect for other people’s things and their belongings. But, every day, probably in every town and city across this vast land, some people will have some property missing. We have to have everything we own locked up. They say that the reason is to ‘keep others honest’, to safeguard their ‘self respect’. The problem is that it is only a concern for ‘those who already have it’. I have noticed in at least two of my children’s homes, there are little signs above their doors, that remind family members that when they leave home to, “Return with Honor”. God bless us all to strive to be as much like the Japanese people have become today as we can. Something good has come out of the war.