The USS Missouri
At Herr Holz’s request, we visited the USS Missouri, which is anchored in Pearl Harbor. I’m sure that most young boys find large seagoing vessels fascinating at some point in their lives; I was not obsessed with them as I was obsessed with, for example, dinosaurs, but you have to admit, battleships are pretty cool. Owing especially to my background as a landlocked desert-dweller, big ships seem ineffably magical and romantic to me. That’s not really relevant to anything, but it explains why I get kind of quiet around them, as one would be quiet around a sleeping god.
The Missouri is the last battleship ever operated by the US Navy, and is notable for (among many other things) being the site of Japan’s official surrender to the United States.
Standing on a piece of history that’s 900 feet long which displaces over 55,000 tons of water is remarkably humbling. When that same piece of history carries some of the largest guns ever to be seaborne; 16-inch shells weighing 2700 pounds and accurate to a range of over 20 miles, well… “humbling” doesn’t quite do it justice.
I won’t lie; it made me kind of want to join the Navy.
The documents that ended World War II are on display there, as is a seal marking the precise spot where those documents were signed.
Occasionally, here in Hawai’i, one finds bits of the semiotic scramble that is Japan. Our visit to the Missouri occasioned one such encounter. Julia pointed out a Japanese tour bus bound for the ship, with 戦艦ミズーリ号 (“The Battleship Missouri”) emblazoned on it. It’s not that I don’t understand why a Japanese person would want to visit the Missouri. I can imagine wanting to see the museum in Hiroshima, for example, which is vaguely analogous. But the manner of this tour bus’s decoration was strange. It showed dramatic angles of the great ship’s gun turrets, had a striking, patriotic stars & stripes paint scheme, and projected an overall message of “Check out this badass battleship with HUGE GUNS, it’s TOTALLY AWESOME! GO USA!” To me, the ship is a symbol of an unfortunate conflict in which my country had to bludgeon senseless, at great cost to both sides, another nation gone quite mad. I would imagine Japanese visiting the ship to engage in quiet introspection about the role WWII played in their nation’s history, and about what the war and its end meant to them.
And perhaps it does. But it’s not marketed like that. Instead it seems to be presented in such a way as to divorce the ship from its history entirely. I’m not actually surprised, but I sure hope a few Japanese have stood where I stood, seen the kanji names on the instrument of surrender documents, and considered what those men were thinking and feeling. Considered the cost.
In other news, my father suggested that a cool part-time job would be working at one of the shopping-mall shooting ranges that specialize in giving Japanese tourists the experience of shooting a real actual gun. The more I think about this, the more I think it would be the best part-time job ever.