Citizen Forum: Hiroshima-Pearl Harbor Reconciliation, Jun. 24

 

Cultural News. June 2008

 

 

Fumio Matsuo

 

     A citizen forum to discuss “Hiroshima-Pearl Harbor Reconciliation” will be held at the Armory Center for the Arts, 145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91103, (626) 792-5101, on Tuesday, June 24, at 6.30 P.M. Admission is free.

 

    The main speaker will be Mr. Fumio Matsuo of Tokyo, veteran Japanese journalist and one of Japan’s most respected American observers for more than 40 years.

 

     He is also the author of the award winning book, Democracy with a Gun – America and the Policy of Force, which was first published in Japanese as Ju wo motsu minshushugi in 2004, winning the 52nd Annual Award of the Japan Essayist Club (the paperback edition was just published by Shogakukan late March). The English translation was published last year by Stone Bridge Press in Berkeley, California.

 

    Mr. Matsuo has served twice in Washington, first as a young correspondent, then as bureau chief of Kyodo News in the late 1960s and in the early 1980s, respectively.

 

    He has also covered the last phase of the Indochina War as the Bangkok bureau chief of Kyodo News, from 1972 to 1975. In 2002, he returned to front-line journalism as an American specialist after retiring from Kyodo as an executive.

 

    In writing Democracy with a Gun: America and the Policy of Force, he drew on his early wartime experiences as a survivor of the B-29 night time indiscriminate incendiary carpet bombings, as well as his many years as a journalist covering international and American affairs.

 

    What was most interesting, as a reader of his book, was finding his analyses of what the Japanese ought to consider when they think about America including the use of force or guns as a “founding value “of America, as he saw represented in the Second Amendment, and the effect that this has had on American wars, culminating with the current Iraq conflict. 

 

    And he raises the question; Japan and America are close, but do they really understand one another? Despite overwhelming American physical presence in Japan, are not the Japanese really still perpetuating a metaphysical state in which America is “so close and yet so far,” just as Japan did prior to the start of the Pacific War?

 

     Then he speaks of the need for reconciliation or “closure of the past “between Japan and America over issues such as the Pearl Harbor Surprise Attack and the atomic bombs just like Germany and America had done already. 

 

    “No incumbent Japanese Prime Minister has ever visited the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor and, similarly, no incumbent American President has visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial,” he said.

 

    On his book promotional tour, Mr. Matsuo will visit Pasadena and give a speech and offer a question and answer session before the American audience with the title “Citizen Forum: Hiroshima-Pearl Harbor Reconciliation.”

 

     The discussion will be moderated by Hugh Leonard of Los Angeles, a business consultant specializing in providing services to Japan-based American companies.

 

    The program is sponsored by the Japan America Society of Southern California, Armory Center for the Arts, and Cultural News.

 

    To RSVP, email info@culturalnews.com or call Cultural News at (213) 819-4100.