Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day to remember those who have died in our nation's service. It is also about reconciliation; about coming together to honor those who gave their all — on both sides.
It was officially observed for the first time on 30 May 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The South refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after
Traditional observance of Memorial Day may have diminished over the years, its meaning and traditions forgotten and obliviously celebrated as just another three-day weekend by most. But for anyone that flips through tv newscasts on Memorial Day, it becomes apparent that people across the nation actually do honor the day appropriately. To top it off, many cable channels wisely choose to air some great war movies on Memorial Day. AMC ran The Devil's Brigade, The Enemy Below, To Hell and Back and The Big Red One today, amoung others. Spike ran the entire fantastic Band of Brothers miniseries. PBS showed an excellent documentary Hallowed Grounds about American foreign cemeteries of WWII. The History Channel, instead, chose to run a marathon of episodes of Pawn Stars. What's up with them? Well, at least it wasn't Ice Cream Truckers, right?
Ah, but my point I want to make about Memorial Day is not about the History Channel having swayed seriously off course. No, I want to comment on the aspect of reconciliation.
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My father had once told me that "we had to go through a lot of good Germans to get to the few bad ones." I think that is what truly makes war such hell. All nations will vilify the enemy as best (or worst) they can. Labels such as Krauts and Nips were rather benign compared to the exaggerations of them depicted in movies and on posters of the era. The recent Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, however, reminds us that not all Germans were Nazis. Some were willing to sacrifice everything to bring down the Third Reich. But most were simply not in a position to do anything of the sort. They found themselves swept up in the war with little recourse but to fight for the survival of their fellow soldiers.
Arnett family in Japanclick to enlarge
My family lived in Japan from 1960 to 1963 (Yokota AFB, 20 miles southwest of Tokyo). I was too young then to have known anything about WWII, let alone that we had been at war with them a mere fifteen years earlier. In essence, our family was there as part of the victorious occupying force, though it certainly didn't feel like it to me. Years later I got to thinking about how I had never once felt any animosity from the Japanese people. I assume that not only did they have to endure the unendurable after the war, but they had to somehow come to a reconciliation of their nation's involvement in the war; the death and destruction they inflicted and had visited upon them as well. I've heard many American survivors of Pearl Harbor say that they will never see fit to forgive the Japanese. That's too bad.
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“Reconcilliation Day”
Anna Arnett wrote...
David,
You may remember when our family attended a high school openhouse in Tokyo. I wandered by myself into a room full of corkboard dividers, each filled with gruesome pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I felt horror and guilt, as I looked about me at the many Japanese, mostly high school students. I saw no animosity whatsoever in them. They practiced reconcilliation.
When your dad got orders for Japan, I admit it bothered me. Useless worry. Every Japanese person I met seemed exemplary. I love the Japanese almost as much as I love Americans.
Paul Arnett wrote...
Being a little older, I remember our life in Japan a little better than my brother. I too never felt any animosity from the Japanese. They were wonderful people.
Quite often Dave and I (and other kids) would go off base into town where we could buy things cheaper than on base. And there were times we went hiking in the country, finding strange little towns that looked unchanged when they were built hundreds of years ago. It was always just us kids, with no adults. Kids could that in Japan. Never once did we encounter a bad experience.
I do recall having air-raid drills at school and, yes, we had a big underground bomb shelter behind the school we had to evacuate into everytime the siren went off. At home we also had L-shaped air-raid trenches in our yard. As kids, this was a wonderful thing as we played in it all the time. While we were still living there, the US finally decided we were no longer an occupying force and these bomb shelters were not necessary and they filled in the trenches and demolished the bunker behind the school. I felt like they were taking away our playground.