No one disputes the “terrible atrocities, including torture, beheadings, and rape,” (quote courtesy of Wikipedia) that the Chamorro suffered under the Japanese.  Tales of these atrocities were easy to come by when I lived on Guahan.  My bus driver, for instance, didn’t only divulge how he came to be disfigured.  He talked about what his family and friends and acquaintances endured.  So did the mayor of Dededo, who hosted the assembly.  Both men were curiously phlegmatic about their experiences as were, I later discovered, most people I met who’d suffered similar and worse fates during the Japanese occupation, even those who had lost relatives and friends.  Maybe this is because Guahan is an island that has labored under foreign occupation for centuries; the Spanish, the Japanese, now the United States.  Yes, even though United States occupation was welcomed on July 21, 1944, as the U.S. Military disembarked and began the successful liberation of Guahan from the Japanese, it’s still an occupation, considering the millennia during which Guahan was not occupied by anyone but the people who originally landed there and their descendants.  Some, now, would argue that Guahan is, again, practically speaking, occupied by the Japanese, who have turned Tumon Bay and other coastal areas into high-rise-hotel tourist havens and who are responsible for the major portion of Guahan’s economic profile.  But, I digress.

In 1965 Mr. Mitsunori Ueki, a member of the Japanese House of Councilors, visited Guahan as part of a Micronesian mission to “console the souls of the war victims”, as Guam Portal tells it.  He met with Monsignor Oscar L. Calvo and, well, I can’t write it better than the Guam Portal has:

“Monsignor Calvo spoke on the misery of the war in detail and said:  ‘It is a mournful fact that, after 20 years since the end of the war, we can still find bones of many dead Japanese scattered and left in the jungle or behind the rocks in the very places where these people fell.  I have been hoping to collect these bones and console the souls of the dead in formal funerals as soon as possible.’  He then proposed to Mr. Ueki that they both should cooperate in such an undertaking.

“Deeply moved by such earnest words, Mr. Ueki voiced his whole-hearted agreement and proposed:  ‘Let us collaborate in building a memorial tower which will heartily console the souls of all the people who perished while dedicating their loyalty to their respective countries, and at the same time symbolize the wishes for friendship between Japan and the U.S. and also for world peace.’  They then shook their hands firmly.

“After some time, the tower was finally completed in May 1970 supported by the sincere friendship and cooperation of the two persons.  The tower is 50 feet high and has an ossuary in its basement.  Its design is in the shape of palms pressed together in prayer indicating the wishes for consolation of the souls of the dead and for peace as well.

“The construction cost as well as its maintenance expenses have been exclusively covered by invaluable donations offered by many people throughout Japan.”

I remember the years leading up to the building and dedication of the park.  There was slight, scattered protest by a few militarily connected people regarding the fact that the park would be close to one of the entrances to Anderson Air Force base.  This protest died quickly once it was realized that the site selected was where the Japanese on Guahan experienced one of their most tragic defeats by the U.S. Military and included the suicide, just before capture, of Lt. Gen. Obata and his battalion of 60.  There are, by the way, a couple of U.S. memorials, close by along the same route, dedicated exclusively to U.S. soldiers who died in the first and last WWII battles fought on the island.

This memorial park is not the only one on Guahan funded by the Japanese.  Agat Peace Memorial Park, dedicated in May, 2008, was financed and erected by a group of Japanese nationals, the Peace Ring of Guam, living on the island.  It includes a centograph engraved with the kanji “wa” (meaning “peace”) “rendered by the late Shoichi Yokoi…a Japanese soldier who hid in the jungle on Guam until 1972 without knowing the war was over,” according to a description of the site listed in the Pacific Islands section of Peace Monuments Related to WWII.  It is astonishing to scroll through this web site and notice the number of war related memorials on U.S. soil erected by foreign nationals, especially but not exclusively the Japanese, including on Oahu, Hawaii, the location of Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona memorial (take that, Newt and Rush).  In the Mariana Islands, alone, two other memorials were erected by the Japanese:  One on Saipan to commemorate the Japanese soldiers and civilians who leapt to their deaths rather than be captured and another on Tinian, the site where the two B29 bombers that delivered atomic bombs to Nagasaki and Hiroshima were based.  

I don’t think you need to have lived on Guahan, nor have been a passenger on a certain Wettengel School bus, to be able to imagine the leap of character it requires to welcome one’s once brutal enemy and acknowledge, even as your body and mind bear the scars inflicted by that enemy, shared humanity and a desire for peace.  Having been that child on that school bus, though, having since been ever grateful for the profound, inspiring impression the Japanese war memorials to peace, erected on land now belonging to their former enemies, engendered in me, having firsthand knowledge that the leap in character required may be extraordinary in length but not at all in human possibility, I can tell you that it helps if your name is neither Newt Gingrich nor Rush Limbaugh.  Thank the gods only two United States citizens carry those names.

Take a look at our history, littered with reconciliation, rough handshakes and hope, only sparsely represented above.  Political rabble rousers such as Gingrich and Limbaugh are betting that we are and will remain ignorant of such history, as well as the facts of the enterprise they are trying to demonize, the Park 51 Community Center (recently renamed because of the protest against the association of "Cordoba" with Islam), despite that it isn't a mosque (and, anyway, so what if it was), it isn't close to being in view of the site of the former World Trade Center and it isn't being built by and won't be used by our enemies.  They are counting on bigotry and fear in each of us and they aren't even doing it to honest purpose.  They don't care if they derail an honorable undertaking like the Park 51 Community Center.  All they want is to turn the tide of the 2010 midterm elections and this dispute is one of the many propaganda bombs, a particularly deadly one, in their arsenal.  It's dirty business; dirty and shameful.   The people of Guahan and many other areas in the U.S. have memorialized peace with former enemies many, many times.  The dispute over the Park 51 Community Center isn't even between enemies.  It's against common citizens, neighbors, friends, fellow victims of and responders to 9/11.  You'd think, then, that the other 310,000,000 of us U.S. citizens can certainly do better by the proposed Park 51 Community Center in Manhattan than Newt and Rush.

Enough, I say, enough.  Time, again, for peace.