[December 7th marks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]
On three
little-known histories that add layers to the Pearl Harbor attack.
1)
The Other Attacks: On the same day as the Pearl
Harbor attack, Japanese forces also launched attacks on three other US
territories (the
Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island) and
three British ones (Malaya,
Singapore,
and Hong
Kong). Compared to the immediacy and intense focus of the Pearl Harbor
bombings, those other attacks tended to be the start of multi-day and –week (or
even
–month) campaigns, and so they were less dramatic, produced far fewer
casualties in that first day, and generally don’t stand out in the same ways as
did and does Pearl Harbor. All of which is to say, I understand why Pearl
Harbor drew the lion’s share of the outrage, attention, and collective
memories, in its own moment
and down into ours. But when it comes to collective memories I’m an additive
guy, and so I think it would still be interesting and important to make these
other attacks, and thus these other spaces and communities, part of our
remembrances on December 7th as well.
2)
The First Prisoners of War: Despite that central
focus on Pearl Harbor, there are of course also histories related to that
attack with which we’re not as collectively familiar. For example, while the
bulk of the attack was from the air, the Japanese sent five two-man
“midget submarines” to raid the harbor; all five were sunk, and nine of
their ten crew killed. The tenth, Japanese sailor Kazuo Sakamaki, lost
consciousness while trying to detonate an explosive device in his submarine and
was found and captured by an American infantryman, Native Hawaiian and Hawaii
National Guard member David
Akui. Sakamaki became the first Japanese prisoner of war in the U.S., and
his submarine became the second: it was recovered and exhibited
around the country as part of wartime propaganda and fund-raising efforts. After
his return to Japan at the war’s end, Sakamaki
wrote a memoir, apparently an honest and thoughtful attempt to grapple with
both his role in the attacks (the English title is I Attacked Pearl Harbor) and his time as a POW (the Japanese one is
Four Years as Prisoner of War Number One),
each of which make Sakamaki one of the war’s most significant individual
figures.
3)
The Niihau Incident: Another prominent Japanese
individual, Shigenori
Nishikaichi, was part of a more complex and fraught post-Pearl Harbor
history. Nishikaichi’s Zero fighter was damaged during the attack, and he flew
to Niihau, a small
nearby Hawaiian island that the Japanese had chosen as a landing and rescue
point for such damaged aircraft. Niihau had no radio or other means of hearing
about the attacks, and that separation contributed to a complex and controversial
next few days for Nishikaichi and the island’s few inhabitants, a period
that ended with Nishikaichi dead, a Japanese American islander committing
suicide after allegedly collaborating with the pilot to recover maps and
documents taken from the plane, and a set of questions that remain open to this
day. As that last hyperlink notes, a new film in production about the incident
seems likely at the very least to reopen all those questions, and perhaps stir
up anti-Japanese American fears at a moment when such xenophobia is literally
the last thing we need. But such is the complex ongoing legacy of Pearl Harbor
and its many historical contexts and echoes.
Next history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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