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I was stationed on Okinawa during the anniversary of the 50th year of friendship. There's no need to drag our present Ally's dignity through the mud over battle history.

For quite a few years I lived at Ishikawa on Okinawa. Loved every moment of it. And, I believe I visited the majority of battle sites and shrines accessible and a few which were actually not. I was startled to be hiking in the hills above what was then Ojana t stumble upon a concrete shrine (not an Okinawan tomb but shrine) in which Japanese had placed their dead. Animals or desecraters or both had broken into it. The skeletons and bits of equipment were exposed to the elements. Rather sad and haunting.

But, I also have good friends, some of whom were members of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, which was captured on Java. Most were sent to Thailand's slave labor camps. Others were sent to Japan, including a Texas boy named Frank Fujita who I never had the pleasure to meet. Foo's story and drawings have been published by the University of North Texas Press.

I liked and thoroughly enjoyed knowing the Okinawans and Japanese I met during my life on the island. I really liked them a lot. But, because of the harm and mistreatment they suffered at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army, there are some who cannot neither forget nor forgive. As difficult as it is, I must respect both.

My simple understanding (reader's digest version):

With all of the ambition and desire the pre-war Japanese culture had, and being so enamored with the Americans that brought them out of their isolation, many pro-militant Japanese (especially the successful combat hardened Imperial Japanese officers) were discouraged by the lack of racial acceptance of what America use to be.

Japanese militant politics fashioned themselves from misconceived fantasies of the Samurai class defeated by, then, modern conscripted Imperial armies. The fascist politics used a twisted modernized Bushido code to "save face" for failed Japanese politics that couldn't halt encroaching Western powers. The militant politics felt that the expanding Japanese population, and hyper-industrializing society, couldn't and shouldn't be constrained to the Japanese Islands. Because Western powers (particularly British and American are faulted by the militant Japanese) didn't offer a compromise to democratic Japanese politics, the whole of Japan was shamed for having to essential neuter its military, and particularly naval power. Militant politics violently took control of Japanese democratic politics.

(Note of 20/20 hindsight...what if America offered business opportunity to replace what Japan would have built? Build oil tankers and cargo ships instead of battleships and carriers and let's all get rich?)

As previously stated, who should the successful Imperial Japanese military powers kowtow to? The Imperial Navy thoroughly destroyed the Russian Tzar's fleet and any Chinese gunboats tried to tangle with Japan. The Imperial Army had decimated Russian Armies even when the Japanese were clearly outnumbered. Many Japanese had given up the agricultural economy to live in industrialized cities. Western powers blocked resources to Japan that would continue to fuel that economy.

Some historians viewing the Japanese side of history state that their country was staring starvation in the face. Some viewing the nature of Japanese Imperialism didn't like the lack of individual rights that the Empire had for its subjects at home and especially lacking for those conquered. I'm sure that fault can be placed on all sides for what led up to WW2 in the Pacific Theater. I also know that the Christian message was neither well received by former Japanese Shoguns nor other powers that decided Nagasaki (largest population of Japanese Christians) was a legitimate target for destruction. But then again, if all with free will were to have accept the Christian message, then there wouldn't have been all this war history we're talking about right now.