Friends or enemies?

When we returned Iwo Jima to Japan, they mocked our Marines'
legendary flag raising by conducting their own flag raising
right next to the memorial marking our flag-raising.

 I was talking with my mother's longtime Japanese immigrant friend the other day.  I've written about her before, as well as her mother.  She's always expressed her gratitude to and admiration for America, although, despite having lived here for almost half a century, she's never become a naturalized citizen.  But in this conversation she was talking about some Japanese politician who, apparently, has become quite popular recently.  His main appeal is his attacks on the "Anpo," the Japanese-American security treaty.  He claims that all other such treaties the U.S. has with other countries requires the U.S. to obtain permission from those countries before it deploys its forces from them, such as, say, dispatching air tankers based in Dubai to refuel bombers sortied from mainland USA.  But only Japan has no such agreement and the U.S. can do whatever it wants without consulting with the Japanese government. This politician says this is arrogance on the part of America and a danger to Japan.

I don't know if this is true or not. I could look it up, but I don't care.  What I do care about is that this woman, who owes -- and has admitted she owes -- all she has ever become, all her success, to the life America not only allowed, but encouraged and helped her to achieve, does not think first what is true about America, and what is best for America, but only about what is claimed about America by Japanese to be harmful to Japan, and only what is best for Japan, even if it is detrimental to America. She, despite having lived a life she never could have in Japan -- and she knows it, and has often said so -- now thinks first and only about Japan and what is good for it, and expresses hostility to America.

Not only that, she asserts such things as that white people have small heads compared to Japanese and are not as smart; in fact are stupid compared to Japanese, and that they are all racists, while Japanese are not racist at all...excuse me while I guffaw till I collapse on the floor...and on and on.

I asked my mother what was going on with this woman, and she said that as people get into old age, the mask slips and their true self and true thoughts are revealed.  Not all people wear masks, of course, so as they become elderly they remain the same as they always have been.  But many people conceal who they fundamentally are, either on purpose, or, often, unknowingly even to themselves.  Then, as they age and mental constraints erode, they say what they really think, express who they really are.  All the resentments, all the slights and insults, real and imagined, that they've received, all the failures they've endured...everything, bursts out of them.  Maybe, she said, it's a last gasp of their life, railing at the unfairness of it all.

I said, okay, but what's all this got to do with this woman's sudden hostility to America and Americans when before she was so positive and admiring?  My mother said that she, of course, couldn't know, but maybe this woman had always resented America for being so much better for her than her own country, her native land, her race and culture.  That a person could hate that which enables their success is not unusual.  People often resent the helping hand even as they grasp it.

We should never have given Iwo Jima back. From Time, March 5, 1945.

I came away from the conversations with both my  mother and her friend with a bitter taste in my mouth.  But I did understand why the Japanese in the United States were interned after Japan attacked us in World War II.  

Later, thinking about everything, I concluded that love of one's native land never dies.  It's a fundamental loyalty to home, to your own people.  You might suppress it for all your life if you need to, but as your end draws near, your soul searches back to its beginnings and there is where your heart is, where it always was, and so you embrace it as the light fades.

That's how I would like to think about it, anyway, how I would like to think about this Japanese woman's ... regression.  I don't know. 

Dying Marine aboard ship at Iwo. Photo by D. Chapelle.

As I've written before, my grandmother was a navy nurse serving aboard a hospital ship at Iwo Jima. The ship took aboard four times the number of  casualties it was equipped to handle. Wounded were placed on the deck because there was no place for them below.  She was tasked with going ashore during the fighting to carry out triage, selecting who was wounded but could wait for evacuation, who would survive if they were evacuated immediately, and who was too badly wounded to save and so were injected with lots of morphine and left to die in as little pain as possible. What terrible decisions for a young

Wounded on deck of hospital ship. Photo by D. Chapelle.

woman to have to make. Again and again, and in haste as life depended on speed.  And as snipers fired at anything that moved and shellfire screamed overhead and mortar shells crashed down.  What lasting horror and remorse and second-guessing that remained fresh and alive in her mind all the rest of her life.

And what was it all for?  We just gave the damned island back to the Japs. Geopolitics?  Geopolitics be God damned. 

 

 

 

The USS Ronald Reagan idles off Iwo Jima, over which a Japanese flag flies, just as if the battle had never been. All for nothing.