Yesterday's battles.(forgetting the wounds of pastwars)

NEW YORK, JUNE 28

THIS is the season of war anniversaries, and these engender the best in humankind, and remind us that that which we once thought perduring, and bled and died for, winces away from moral inflexibility under the tides of history.

In Japan they are having a complicated time centering on Saipan. This island now belongs to us, and we paid dearly for it. Sixty-one years ago, from June 15 to July 9, 1944, our men fought to take the island, as the first step in wresting the Marianas away from Japan. The Japanese defenders resisted desperately, but the Americans finally prevailed. The island remains U.S. property, and there are no irredentist demands being made by the Japanese, even though they owned it throughout their empire days, from 1914 until we took it from them in 1944.

Life there today appears to center less on nationalist impulses than on the cultivation of tourism. What excited attention this week was the appearance on Saipan of Japan's elusive Emperor Akihito, son of Hirohito, whose death in 1989 we let pass by without a very industrious historical investigation of his bloody role first as conqueror of China, then as war leader in a military enterprise that kicked off with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Coming to the point at hand, a decade or so ago, the citizens of Honolulu welcomed one of the pilots of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which proved to be a date that would not quite live in infamy--another broken promise by FDR. But the pilot was treated merely as a technician of war--a man who receives orders from above to drop bombs on particular targets, and does so without any thought to the moral consequences of the deed.

The disruption this week was on the matter of whose deaths was the emperor to grieve. Obviously the dead Japanese, and here he singled out for special attention, in addition to the soldiers who died fighting, the hundreds of civilians who died in a spectacular mass suicide rather than surrender to American soldiers.

The emperor intended to commemorate the loss not only of the ...