The Dresden Moment

The Wall Street Journal on its main website, has a Op-Ed by a Japanese national, Fumio Matsuo, suggesting that the U.S. and Japan need some kind of reconciliation ceremony:

My conviction that we need a postwar settlement of accounts is triggered by memory of the way the city of Dresden marked the 50th anniversary of the Allied bombings that killed 35,000. I was surprised to see in attendance the military leaders of Germany's former enemies and representatives of the British Royal Family. It was clear that everyone had engaged in much back-stage diplomacy. Japan and the U.S., on the other hand, have never engaged in any meaningful discussion of their wartime actions, even though far more people (conservatively, 83,793) were killed by the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945, than in Dresden. This was the first of a series of indiscriminate bombings of 69 cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. According to Japanese government estimates, about 510,000 civilians were killed. Yet Japan and the U.S. have never held such a reconciliation ceremony.

I agree with him about the need for this kind of a meeting and joining in sorrow over the death and destruction of WWII, both for their own losses and those they inflicted. This is probably harder for the Americans because of the recriminations from our own intellectual elite for the past 60 years about the morality of the decision to use the atomic bombs.

I wasn't around at the time, but I sense that most Americans have a core sympathy for the victims of war on both sides. There have been many little reconciliations between veterans of the war who have reached out to express their personal sorrow for having to kill others even when they felt it was a just struggle. It's not guilt or feeling unjustified in their feelings at the time, but a deeper sorrow that such things as war exist, and that sense embodied in the poem, The man he killed. I think that a similar meeting between heads of state and high military officials might serve to give the people a chance to participate in that reconciliation and sense of regret that war takes such a toll and acknowledgment that individuals who are caught up in struggles between empires don't deserve the hatred that was felt during the time of war.