The Emperor's visit to Palao

1.      On 8 and 9 of this month, April 2015, the Emperor and the Empress of Japan paid an overnight visit to Palau.  They were welcomed by the President and his wife of not only Palau, who were the hosts, but also of the Marshal Islands and of Micronesia.  These three were the constituents of the former League of Nations Mandated Territory under the Japanese rule from the end of the First World War till the end of the Second, with Palau as its capital. Conspicuous by absence was the Mariana Islands, also a part of the Mandated Territory but, being under the American rule, are not an independent country.  But the Emperor and the Empress had already paid a visit to Saipan in the Marianas 10 years before, to commemorate the sixtieth year after the end of the War.  It had seen fierce battles during the War.  The US converted those islands into a powerful military base, and it was some of the bombers from Tinian, near Saipan, which dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
2.      This visit was to commemorate the seventieth year.  Judging from their itinerary it seems that their main purpose was to spend some hours on the second day in Pereliu, a small island off Palau, 9 by 3 kms, where the Japanese garrison in trenches and caves fought till the finish for two months from September 1944, with only 34 survivors out of the initial 10,400.  They offered flowers, carried from Japan for this purpose, to the memorial. They also paid a visit to the American memorial, and they bowed deeply toward another island called Angaur nearby where a similar battle was fought.
3.      Some of the survivors, as well as the families of the dead, arranged their own visit simultaneously.  They said, 'War is a dreadful thing, you cannot win, you cannot lose', 'I want to know why we had to fight a war like this', or, 'I am glad that Pereliu has become known like this.'
4.      In the post-War Constitution of Japan, the Emperor has no political importance.  It is, however, significant that he and the Empress have increasingly, although almost imperceptibly, expressed their interest in the question of war and peace.  I am watching the process with great interest.  In his New Year message, 2015, the Emperor even said that we should learn the history of this War well, starting from the 'Manchurian Incident' of 1931, to think about the future of Japan.  It is remarkable that he is thinking in terms of the fifteen-year War, from 1931 to 45, and is trying to grasp it as a whole, which is not what all the historians are doing, let alone the politicians in the Government.  He may be worried that the war memory is gradually fading away.  Also that Japan is on the way to more militarization.  He is not in a position to say all this, and he has not.
5.      His Palau visit may give some a good excuse to visit the Yasukuni War Shrine in the name of commemorating the dead in the War.  In my view, however, it will be more than overcome by the intense, though not permanent, interest in the memory of the furious, and futile, War that the visit has revived among the general public.