War memories across the Pacific: Japanese visitors at the Arizona Memorial

Abstract

This article investigates Japanese visitors' experiences of the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, based on results gained from fieldwork observations, questionnaires, and personal interviews. Japanese visitors tend to understand the memorial and interpret its significance quite differently from the majority of US visitors. Nonetheless, the memorial clearly functions as a site for enhancing national consciousness for Japanese as well as US visitors, as they become acutely aware of their difference from Americans and in so doing reconfirm their own sense of national identity. While the Japanese understanding of the memorial serves to de-Americanize the significance of one of the most recognized national landmarks in the United States, it simultaneously reinforces the site's function as a national memorial by crystallizing a sense of difference based on national identities and encouraging a historical understanding based on a nationalist framework.