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For Pete’s sake. The Japanese whiners have been protesting us since Gen. MacArthur gave them a constitution.

Once on leave in Japan, I’m pretty sure I met a Japanese Marine who wanted to re-fight the Mt. Suribachi flag raising. I told him my uncle was nearby on the island, it’s his fault and I wasn’t born yet. Didn’t matter. He waved his fist, got in his wheelchair, spit out some nasty words (I think) and wheeled himself away.

The mama-san who witnessed the matter said don’t worry. He does that to all American Marines. Then she gave me a thumbs up, offered me a plate of pickled octopus and a glass of saki.

I still burp thinking about it.

"The Japanese whiners have been protesting us since Gen. MacArthur gave them a constitution."

MacArthur has plenty of admirers in Japan. General MacArthur is seen by many to have been the de facto leader of Japan during the critical post war recovery years. My sense is that many Japanese have a tremendous amount of respect for General MacArthur as someone who knew how to fight a war and someone who knew how to rule a country. IIRC, we had an agreement with the Soviets that they would control the northern part of Japan after WWII. MacArthur never honored that agreement, and thereby kept Japan from civil war and a North vs. South Korea type of partition. He was a general who ruled, and that was a form of leadership the Japanese could understand, given their history of having been ruled by generals during different phases of their history. He also expressed confidence in the Japanese people at a time when they had lost confidence in themselves.

I read an interesting account recently, where the submarine USS Archerfish visited Yokosuka at some point after the war and had to be serviced in a dry dock.

They put her into the largest drydock available which apparently was the only one available to take care of her.

It also just happened to be the same drydock that the IJN Shinano was fitted out in before she joined the fleet, and was (I think) the largest and heaviest warship in the world at the time (she was originally to be a Yamato class battleship, and was the largest warship built at 72,000 tons until the US built the USS Enterprise in 1961.

So, here was the Archerfish, who had sunk the Shinano, now in the same drydock the Shinano had been born in, only a few years after the war.

The Japanese shipworkers who were to do the repairs were the same men who had built the Shinano. They knew who the Archerfish was and what she had done, and were all sitting up there silently, eating their lunch of rice and who knows what.

It was apparently pretty tense...so the Captain of the Archerfish offered tours of the submarine to any one of them who wanted to come aboard. Many did, and that broke the ice, or so he said...:)