As a symbol of our patriotism, we make a great deal of the sinking of the Arizona when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It got us into the war. That the Arizona was an old WW1 battleship commissioned in 1916 with a wooden deck and was obsolete for the war which was about to be fought is beside the point. For us it is a symbol. In Japan, Hiroshima is their symbol of the suffering their people endured. They lost over 2 million of their men in the war and 800,000 civilians. They, like us, were obeying the call of their country. It was a disaster led by a military steeped in the samurai tradition where the ultimate authority was the Emperor. The people eventually recovered from the disaster and have rebuilt their country.
Unfortunately, the Japanese never hear the accounts of why, as a result of Japanese militarization, foreign invasion and brutal occupation, and a long bloody war in the South Pacific, the dropping of a nuclear device on a civilian population, however repugnant, was eventually the only way to save the lives of American soldiers who threw themselves at the enemy defenses on Okinawa. 49,000 American soldiers died on that island to defend us against military fascism. I like to think they didn't die in vain.
When schoolchildren in Japan, doing their projects, go round the memorial at Hiroshima with their teachers, they do not learn about the horrors of Japanese military occupation only about the horrors of the dropping of the bomb. They see the burned remnants of the clothes worn by teenage volunteers who were charged with clearing fire lanes for the next American bombing raid. They see the vaporized shadow of a man sitting on the steps of the local bank. They see buckled plates and glasses melted by the explosion. The history books and their teachers never mention why this came about, only that they suffered greatly and rebuilt and are against nuclear war and are now successful.
We are no different in our treatment of history. We totally ignore teaching how colonial forces defeated the Native American population of Arizona during the Indian Wars by starving them. Our seizure of Arizona from Mexico in the Mexico American war of 1848 is not to be talked about. How would white settlers in Arizona cope with the idea than those who clean their houses and cut their grass were here first. Our insecurity is so great we have to build a wall against them even trying to come back. History, we know, is written by the winners. Only by teaching history in its entirety from all perspectives and by showing respect for everyone no matter where he or she came from, will we be able to build a just and viable society for the future where we can all get on which other to defeat pandemics and global warming, ...and the effects of slavery.