No Apology but Good Thinking

[Unkotare]

Emperor Visits Site Near Pearl Harbor

No speech given and this


Initial plans for Emperor Akihito's two-week tour of the United States had included a stop at the Arizona memorial, an arching white structure built atop the ship's remains that seems to float above the harbor itself. But objections from Japan's nationalist right wing, which has long argued that the attack was a justifiable response to an American war embargo, made the government shy away from that hugely symbolic site.


I'm not pissed or anything about the speech, just think it was unnecessary and contributes to the belief that the US is what's wrong with the world..

"...the Emperor of Japan today laid a wreath at a monument for war dead at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

The somber and sparsely attended gesture of sorrow for the losses incurred in war was an oblique gesture to the 2,395 servicemen killed the day Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor just after dawn on Dec. 7, 1941."

 

[Unkotare]

"...Emperor Akihito and his wife, Empress Michiko, accompanied by the former Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, the Japanese Ambassador to Washington and a handful of other prominent Japanese political figures visited the volcanic crater known here as the "Punch Bowl" because of its geological shape. Heavy Price of War

The Punch Bowl Cemetery, just a few miles away from Pearl Harbor, commemorates 38,000 war dead from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. It includes the names of 18,093 soldiers who were missing in action or lost at sea during the protracted fighting of World War II. Japanese officials have been saying for weeks that the site better represents the total cost of the World War II and the price of war in general. They have tried to depict the Emperor's visit to the cemetery as a broad gesture of shared sadness over that conflict."


"Emperor Akihito bent to place a white and yellow wreath at the base of the granite monument. Then, he bowed for nearly a minute as the group observed a moment of silence. As he slowly regained his normal posture, buglers played echo taps. One bugler standing atop a tall memorial to the north began to play. Another on a similar memorial etched with names to the south followed beats behind."


"Francis Damon, an 83-year-old Army veteran who was a civilian at the time of the attack but later joined the Marines, joined about 50 people clustered beneath a banyon tree to one side. Wearing his old military uniform and watching every detail from afar, he said he still remembers the attack vividly and that he attended the brief ceremony partly for his Japanese wife who is hospitalized."


"Lance Corp. Bradley Niblock, a trombone player, said he agreed with the Japanese Government. "This is where the people from Pearl Harbor were buried," he said. "So it is really as important as Pearl Harbor.""