UW-Madison President Clarence Dykstra speaks at an all-University convocation held five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor at the UW Field House. “This is a time for consecration in the high purposes to which America was dedicated,” Dykstra said. (Photo courtesy UW-Madison Archives)
Undergraduates in Louise Young’s lecture course on the Pacific war have no trouble remembering what happened in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That’s because the Japanese attack looms large in our national psyche, says History professor Young, not only as the end of U.S. isolationism but as a metaphor for unreadiness.
“Caught napping. Caught with our pants down,” says Young, who has taught the lecture course, Pearl Harbor & Hiroshima: Japan, the U.S. & the Crisis in Asia, for several years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s how some of the big war memoirs phrase it. Pearl Harbor was—and still is—synonymous with ‘sneak attack.’”
How we remember Pearl Harbor says much about the way we engage with the world, says Young.
Here in the United States, the attack is seen as a seminal event, a “date that will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt put it—and yet Japan carried out other attacks in the Pacific that day, some more significant in terms of loss of life, than Pearl Harbor.
And then there was China, where a horrifying event occurred that most of Young’s undergraduates know nothing about.
“Most of my students—like most Americans—think World War II in Asia started with Pearl Harbor,” she says. “But it actually began much earlier, with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.”
Hundreds of thousands were killed in a six-week massacre known as the “rape of Nanking,” but somehow, for decades, this event was lost to public memory, both here and in Japan.
“China’s voice was silenced, partly due to Cold War containment, which tended to erase that earlier part of World War II,” says Young.
Yaowen Dong, a senior majoring in Political Science and Philosophy, took Young’s 400-level history course last fall. Before, Dong says, he had always been perplexed as to why Japan would actively challenge a superior industrial and military power like the United States in what seemed a rash and risky attack. The class taught him about how the flames of Japanese imperialism were fanned to new heights by the invasion of China. He also learned about pan-Asianism, and how Japan saw itself at the center of that movement.
“Imperial Japan was engaged in a mortal struggle for racial supremacy,” he says. “From this perspective, I started to see the attack on Pearl Harbor as natural and even inevitable."
Remembering World War II in the Pacific takes different forms in different countries. In 1994, Congress declared Dec. 7 National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, “in honor of the 3,500 Americans killed or wounded during the deadly attack.” Three decades earlier, the USS Arizona National Memorial was constructed over the remains of the sunken battleship that sustained the most casualties from the attack on Pearl Harbor.
There are no such memorials to Pearl Harbor in Japan, but there are peace parks in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the United States dropped the atomic bombs that ended the war.
The History 456 lecture course on Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima will be taught this spring by Judd Kinzley, a newly-hired historian of modern China. He says students are usually very interested to learn about the war in the Pacific from varying viewpoints.
“What I try to do is make the story of the war less America-centric and more Asia-centric,” says Kinzley. “For instance, we will talk about the Japanese attacks on Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, which are just as meaningful as Pearl Harbor in the grand scheme of the war. It’s very important to look at the much larger wartime puzzle.”