Reflecting on the WWII story account, we [me and my wife] visited the battleship Missouri, which was decommissioned in 1998. It rests a tone’s throw away from the Arizona. On the deck of this battleship the surrender by Japan was signed, and that formally ended WW II.
As my wife and I stood on the deck of the Missouri, overlooking beautiful Pearl Harbor, the serene countryside and its gorgeous cloud-filled skies, we could not help but reflect in total amazement on man’s inhumanity to man in the World War II. We could not conceive of what possible justification existed in the minds of those fighter pilots swooping in on that early Sunday morning, to indiscriminately kill and maim their fellow man!
In 1999, the battleship USS Missouri was moved to Pearl Harbor from the United States west coast and docked near, and perpendicular to, the USS Arizona Memorial. Upon the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the Japanese surrendered to United States General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, ending World War II. The pairing of the two ships became an evocative symbol of the beginning and end of the United States' participation in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen.
The pairing of the two ships has not been free from controversy, however. Memorial staff has criticized the placement of the Missouri, saying the large battleship would "overshadow" the Arizona Memorial of the World War II. To help guard against this perception Missouri was placed well back of the Arizona Memorial, and positioned in Pearl Harbor in such a way as to prevent those participating in Military Ceremonies on Missouri's aft decks from seeing the Arizona Memorial. The decision to have Missouri's bow face the Arizona Memorial was intended to convey that Missouri now watches over the remains of the battleship Arizona so that those interred within Arizona's hull may rest in peace. These measures have helped preserve the individual identities of the Arizona Memorial and the Missouri Memorial, which has improved the public's perception of having both Arizona and Missouri in the same harbor.
A flood of emotions overwhelmed me. My thoughts went back in time, to Sept 2, 1945. The members of my family had been incarcerated in various different Japanese concentration camps for years in WW II. On the very day that surrender document was signed on the Missouri, I was only 10 years old, a ‘boy-slave’ of the Japanese death camp slaves. I had been separated from my Mother, my Dad, and my siblings. My oldest brother was a P.O.W. in Japan. Had ‘The Bomb’— which led to Japan’s signing of the surrender — had it been dropped just a week later, I would not have made it. I was literally on ‘death’s doorstep,’ emaciated, dehydrated, suffering from beriberi and dysentery.
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