Pearl Harbor: From 'Infamy' to Friendship

Donald Stratton, a 19-year-old from Nebraska, strode out of the mess hall onto the deck of the battleship Arizona. It was Dec. 7, 1941, and the ship was anchored in Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. On this clear, bright morning, Stratton noticed some fellow crewmen pointing at the sky. Looking up, he saw fighter planes approaching. Dozens of them.

“I watched one of them bank and saw the rising sun symbol under the wings and thought, ‘Boy, that’s the Japanese, and they’re bombing us,’” he recalled decades later.

Within seconds, Japanese bombers were dropping bombs and torpedoes, targeting the Arizona and seven other battleships.

Suddenly, Stratton felt the Arizona heave violently and rise several feet out of the water. A bomb had breached the ship’s ammunition room and the tremendous explosion that followed sent the Arizona—and the more than 1,000 sailors and Marines aboard—to the bottom of the harbor.

“A 600-foot fireball just engulfed us, burning all of us real bad,” Stratton recalled. “After that it was all about self-preservation, buddy. We weren’t thinking about anything but getting the hell out of there.”

That attack 75 years ago on America’s Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor was a day that would “live in infamy,” in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who addressed the nation the next afternoon. Despite a strong desire to keep out of World War II (1939-45), the U.S. was forced to declare war not only on Japan, but also on Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy (see Timeline, p. 20). 

The brutal war in the Pacific would last four years and end with the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people (see box, p. 21). Remarkably, however, the way America handled the seven-year occupation of Japan that followed led to the two countries becoming warm and devoted friends, which they remain today.

“In the decades since [the war], the relationship between the two countries has been about partnership, economic security, political partnership,” says Peter Grilli, the president emeritus of the Japan Society of Boston. “America has been Japan’s best ally since.” 

The attack on Pearl Harbor was conducted by two waves of Japanese aircraft—353 planes in all—taking off from six aircraft carriers. For two hours, the planes rained bombs and torpedoes on eight U.S. battleships in Pearl Harbor, as well as on four destroyers, three cruisers, and dozens of planes parked on nearby airfields. In the end, 2,403 U.S. personnel were killed, making Pearl Harbor the worst naval disaster in American history.

Yet the attack shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. For more than a decade, a militaristic Japan had expanded into neighboring territories. By 1942, much of Asia was under Japanese occupation, including the Philippines; what is today Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; and large swaths of mainland China. Japan justified its actions by arguing that it needed natural resources like oil, and as a regional power had a right to dominate the continent. The U.S., with help from Britain and the Netherlands, responded by imposing an embargo that cut off 90 percent of Japan’s oil, jeopardizing its economy.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Harvard-educated commander of the Japanese fleet, persuaded Japan’s leaders that a single decisive strike like the one on Pearl Harbor would force the U.S. to end the embargo. 

Instead, the devastating blow unified America for an all-out fight. President Roosevelt, a former secretary of the Navy, knew how unprepared the U.S. was militarily, but he inspired Americans to bear down and build a war machine. The result was a breathtaking mobilization that produced enough planes and ships to ultimately defeat the Japanese. 

In August 1945, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a controversial decision that is still debated today. On August 15, the Japanese announced their surrender.

After the war, General Douglas MacArthur and his staff shrewdly sent in shiploads of food to a decimated Japan. They allowed Japan to keep its emperor but downgraded him to a figurehead without real political power. Closely studying Japan’s sociology and politics, they worked diligently to reshape the nation’s militaristic mind-set. They helped write a parliamentary constitution that renounced war and prohibited “land, sea, and air forces,” though it permitted civilian-controlled “Self-Defense Forces.” The difference between offense and defense can be murky, yet Japan hasn’t sent a soldier into combat since 1945, and unlike some other industrialized nations, hasn’t developed nuclear weapons.

Grilli, of the Japan Society, was 5 in 1947 when he joined his father, a member of the U.S.-occupying administration, in Japan. He remembers how friendly the Japanese were to Americans. 

“To many Japanese, we were liberators from oppression by a militaristic, thought-controlling government,” he says. “For other Japanese, it was a liberation from suffering, starvation, and misery.

Soon after the war, the Japanese were back at work. Their nation’s economy received a major boost during the Korean War (1950-53), when the U.S. became a big customer of Japanese companies, like Mitsubishi, that built ships and tanks. In 1960, the two countries signed a mutual security treaty, with America pledging to defend Japan against expansionist threats from Communist China and the Soviet Union, and Japan granting the U.S. permission to use its territory for military bases.

The Tokyo Olympics in 1964 demonstrated that Japan was back on its feet and booming. Indeed, concentrating on economic recovery instead of weapons, Japan became the world’s second-largest economy in 1968, after the U.S. (though more recent stagnation has allowed an increasingly capitalistic China to push Japan down to No. 3). 

By the 1970s, Toyota, Sony, and other companies were making cars, cameras, and TV sets that were snapped up by Americans for their precision and price. At the same time, the Japanese grew fond of Hollywood movies, jazz, jeans, baseball, and hamburgers. Students were offered scholarships to study at American schools, many of them going on to become Japan’s civic and business leaders.

“One of the things that made relations difficult in the past is that Americans didn’t know the Japanese and the Japanese public didn’t know the U.S.,” says Motoatsu Sakurai, a former Japanese diplomat in New York and now the president of New York’s Japan Society. “In fact, in many ways Japan and the United States are complementary. 

The U.S. is a big country with lots of resources and a large market. Japan is a small country that pays attention to small details and craftsmanship.”

Today, Japan’s record of pacifism seems vulnerable. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe thinks the military restrictions Japan agreed to after the war are outdated in a region where nuclear-armed China and North Korea periodically rattle sabers. He thinks Japan, with its economic clout, needs a stronger military to play its part in global affairs and not rely so much on the U.S., which has more than 50,000 military personnel stationed in Japan. Some Japanese have called on the U.S. to remove its bases, including 65,000 protesters in Okinawa who took to the streets in June. 

Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, thinks such issues will need to get worked out. But overall, she says, the friendship between the U.S. and Japan will remain strong because the two countries share so many of the same values.

“When we’re talking about problems like ISIS, when we’re talking about what’s happening in the oil markets or the global economy, when we talk about development goals and human rights,” Smith says, “there’s very little space between what we and the Japanese think the goals should be.”

It was an extraordinary scene: President Obama, leader of the nation that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima seven decades ago, embracing survivors of that attack in Hiroshima itself.

In May, Obama laid a wreath and delivered impassioned words at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. He said “mankind possessed the means to destroy itself” and must undertake a “moral revolution” to ensure atomic bombs aren’t used again.

Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, didn’t apologize for the bombing, which ushered in the atomic age and the dread it posed for humanity’s future. Whether the U.S. should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and on a second Japanese city, Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 Japanese civilians in total, remains a matter of fierce debate. Critics say far too many innocent lives were lost. Supporters argue the bombings saved the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers who would have been deployed to conquer Japan.

Obama spoke about the common humanity of Americans and Japanese and the value of all human life.

Sunao Tsuboi, the 91-year-old chairman of the Hiroshima branch of atomic bomb victims, “gripped Obama’s hand and would not let go until he had spoken to him for some time,” The New York Times reported. He was a 20-year-old college student when the blast devastated his city and seared most of his flesh.

“I held his hand and we didn’t need an interpreter,” Tsuboi said. “I could understand what he wanted to say by his expression.”