I’d been taught since grade school that December 8, 1941 was the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But it was only very recently—embarrassingly recently—that I learned the carrier task force carrying the Zero squadrons had already set sail more than ten days earlier, leaving Hitokappu Bay on Etorofu Island on November 26.
(Today is November 28, 2025.)
On top of that, I also learned that the entire voyage was in fact laid bare to the Americans through their signal intercepts.
The so-called “Hull Note,” often described as the trigger for the war, was received that same day, the 26th (American time).
But even that point feels somehow suspicious to me.
What is certain, though, is this:
whenever war breaks out, the ones dragged into the flames are always ordinary people—people like me—who live out their whole lives without ever knowing the truth about places like Hitokappu.
My grandfather’s younger brother was killed in the war.
My grandfather alone survived, and lived on into the Heisei era.
80 postwar years are now drawing to a close.
What will the landscape look like at the hundred-year mark, I wonder…
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