May this courageous and noble warrior rest in peace for all time.

What Japan did across the Pacific was an incredible crime against humanity. It is not taught in schools in Japan even today. Saburo Sakai, Japan's leading fighter ace of WW2 said that he feared Japan had learned nothing from WW2. You must educate yourself on the history of what Japan did.

I would strongly suggest you read Arnold Brackman's book, The Other Nuremburg, which is available on Amazon.com. There are still people alive today who committed some of these attrocities. There are still victims alive today who suffered under the Japanese. What the government and people of Japan have a responsibility to do is to compensate those victims remaining, punish those they can find who committed these acts, teach their people what really occured, and apologize as a nation for what occured.

At the 1993 Nimitz Foundation Symposium in San Antonio, which covered events of 1943, at dinner my father was seated next to Zenji Abe, an IJN Val pilot at Pearl Harbor. With his daughter interpreting, he told my father at the time of the attack he wasn’t sure if he was doing the right thing, but as an officer he did his duty. He said that after the war when he discovered everything Japan had done to the peoples in the countries it had occupied, he started going all over Japan and teaching about the horrors the Japanese military had committed, but that wasn’t being taught in schools. He said because of this, he had been greatly ostracized by many segments of Japanese society. Then he looked at my father and told him that it would never be right until the Emperor apologized to the world. At this time Emperor Hirohito as still alive.

Hearing that meant a lot to my father and helped further heal something that started in Nagasaki. After my father had completed his task of disarming the Japanese coastal batteries, he said he went into Nagasaki. My dad was not a large guy. Only five foot, seven inches. But he had with him a corporal who my dad said was a giant of a man. He also said that basically they were going into Nagasaki "looking for trouble".
They came across the flattened home that had a woman – fortyish, her daughter late teens or early twenties, and a couple of smaller children. My dad said that when they saw the corporal their eyes got huge. He learned later that one of them said no wonder they lost after seeing the size of him. She motioned for my father and the corporal to sit down and share the little bit of food they had. The mother said something to the daughter, who went digging through the rubble and came back with an English to Japanese dictionary. The mother basically was able to communicate to them that when she saw them, she knew they had nothing to fear. My dad said at this point a lot of the hate he had in him for the Japanese left him. There are other stories, but these were the most poignant. There is not a day go by that I don’t miss him and wish he were here to teach me more.