The Japan Tours

It seemed every school I went to had a greeting for me. 

At a dinner with both the American and Japanese embassy people, a Japanese man stopped the dinner halfway through, saying he wanted to tell us a story. It went like this:

"Mr. & Mrs. Milne, the Japanese people want you to know how much we appreciate the way your president ended World War II."

After our initial expressions of disbelief and amazement he continued:

"Our leaders at the time were insane. We all knew it. When we first heard that they had bombed Pearl Harbor we were all in terrible fear. We knew that the Americans would come back ferociously and our island would be destroyed, killing millions of us in the process. Our leaders then cut off all communications between cities. We didn't know what was happening just short miles away because all news came to us from government controlled newspapers and radio stations. 

"The news we received were things like this: "The victorious Japanese air force and navy have sunk all the American ships at Midway and smashed the American troops! The Japanese forces have destroyed the Americans at Guadalcanal! The Americans have been defeated at Okinawa!  Glory be to the Emperor!

"Of course, we all knew these were lies.  We also knew the Americans, now in full control of Okinawa, would soon be landing on our beloved mainland (Honshu), and we would die. The Americans would lose 200,000 soldiers as well. But then your president destroyed Hiroshima with an atomic bomb. We didn't know it at the time because all communications had been shut down. But Hiroshima wasn't enough to stop our insane leaders, so next your president bombed Nagasaki with another atomic weapon. Now our emperor had to admit defeat. 

"As a result of your president's actions, we Japanese only lost 100,000 people instead of a million or more, and we want you to know that the people of Japan thank your president for what he did."

Addendum 1: we later learned of an old man who had been taken by soldiers towards the end of the war. They outfitted this man with grenades when he was young. He was given instructions to go to the beach when the Americans came in and throw the grenades at the invaders. He lived because the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki stopped the war before he would have been sacrificed on a beach somewhere.

Addendum 2: two years later, when at another dinner with our Japanese hosts, a different person told us the same story. It was as if they knew how the bombing stories had been twisted in American society to turn us against ourselves, and that they wanted us to know the truth.