Good post.
I am going to check that book out if I can find it. As you said, at that time, cryptography was a fetid backwater of the military, I would guess nobody went into it if they had any choice in the matter.
In the movie, I was mistaking the dinner the American officers had with the Japanese (the film said 1937) for a later meeting with the officers of the USS Astoria in 1939 that had bought the ashes of Japan’s Ambassador (Hirosi Saito) back to Japan as a sign of respect. I expect the similarity between the two dinners was that the Japanese naval officers were generally openly hostile and dismissive of their American counterparts at both of them.
Love your story-I lived in Japan (Yokosuka) for a few years as a dependent, and I liked the Japanese. I was old enough (8-11) to know the things they had done in WWII, but it didn’t resonate with me enough to shake my amicable feelings.
However, we spent a few years in the Philippines (Subic Bay) after that, and the attitude there towards the Japanese was quite hostile. When I was in the Scouts, we did an annual hike along the route of the Bataan Death March, and while I was only able to ride in the support truck due to a medical issue, I saw all those white markers. That compelled me to read several books detailing both the Bataan Death March and the overall experience of our POW’s held by Japan, and my attitude did change somewhat after that. What they did to our men and the populations of people they occupied was appalling, and it left a mark on me for many years. I wonder if I had been a bit young to read that book in its entirety, and the descriptions in it of the conduct of the Japanese was difficult to reconcile with the firsthand encounters I had of them.
It reminded me of the cognitive dissonance that Judge Daniel Haywood (one of the three tribunal judges at the Nuremberg Trials played by Spencer Tracy in “Judgement at Nuremberg”) felt when he went into the court rooms, and saw the horrible shocking film footage from the Nazi death camps, then went out to a beer hall for dinner and saw these jovial Germans laughing and drinking. He couldn’t reconcile them with what he saw.
It was much the same for me.
I once knew a man who was assigned to be the US Army Provost Marshal for the Hiroshima district when the war ended, but after they dropped the bomb there, they thought he would be more useful in Korea. His job there was to get the Japanese military personnel out of Korea as quickly as possible before they were massacred by the Koreans who had lived under their abuse. When I visited him once and the topic shifted to Japan, his attitude changed, he clammed up, and then left the room. I asked a lifelong friend of his if he was okay, and he said that even to that day (back in the Nineties) he had a burning dislike of the Japanese as a result of what he saw firsthand in Korea back in 1945.
Love your story about your wife and marriage...I do respect the Japanese in many ways, and am glad we are an ally and not a foe. I hope it doesn’t come to it that we need to fight with them against China, but I feel more pessimistic about that as time goes on.
Great to hear about your experiences in Japan and the Philippines.
Another good book I recently heard on Audio CD was Bill O’Reilly’s Killing the Rising Sun, which focuses on the last year and a half of bloody battles between the US and Japan.
O’Reilly and his co-author go through the horros of Battle of Peleliu and Okinawa and the butchery and rapes of the Japanese in the Philippines were discussed as well.
By the you got to history of the A-Bomb you knew it was absolutely the right decision for Americans and Japanese.
Highly recommend that book. I just love the Audio CD format because I can listen to it in the car and kill dead time on my commute.