On a beautiful Sunday morning in Hawaii, a sleeping giant was awakened, and filled with a terrible resolve.

I was at the memorial about a year ago. Some of the tour guides there were present at the scene, and described the chaos and heroism. There is a project to capture their memories and pictures, before they're all gone.

The memorial itself is deteriorating, and needs to be replaced. If you'd like to help, today might be a good time to do it, while we remember.

[Update mid morning]

Here's a story about five of the survivors.

As someone who spent a lot of quiet Sunday mornings on ships of war let me say, this day is sad for me. It now serves to remind me that the re-writers of history are winning the war of words, with respect to our nations motivations during WWII.

December 7th, 1941 is an all but forgotten moment in our history. The sadder part still, is our national semi-obsession with saying mea culpa every August 6th. We must be reminded that we blasted 100,000 people to death in a blinding flash, without remembering that we were attacked 3 years and 8 months before that by Japanese Imperialists set on world domination.

The Japanese militarists used and abused their own power and their own people to affect that domination. They killed, raped and pillaged their way across much of southern Asia. To this day they have yet to even admit that a great deal of their actions ever happened. The Nanking Massacre alone took 3 times the number of lives that were lost at Hiroshima.

Yet, that August 6th bomb has defined us as the bad guys. Sad, but true.

I realize that few will (want to) consider the thing, but try to imagine what the world would be like today if we had invaded the Home Islands. Read up on Operation Downfall.

I have no doubt that it would be a much different and sadder place than it is today.

Most probably we would now be criticized for not using the bomb rather than invading.

In today's environment there is no way we can win.

"In today's environment there is no way we can win."

Sure there is! The way to win is not to play their game.

I sometimes wonder how long Americans will even notice the significance of this date. I've been marking it since I was about 13, or for more that 30 years. But I've noticed that each year fewer can answer if I ask "Do you know what today is?"

1. If you blockade an island nation's shipping you are already at war with them.

2. Dang imperialist Japanese, why couldn't they be more like our... imperialist allies the British and French?

The more I learn about the War in the Pacific the more I'm convinced the whole thing was about trying to prevent non-Whites from having the same imperial holdings our White ally nations already had. What makes it worse is that the American view is on par with Michael Moore's kite-flying Iraqis. Face if folks: the ships and sailors at Pearl Harbor were legitimate military targets in a war that was already in progress, and the Japanese fooled us. The only thing that had been missing was the declaration -- Pearl Harbor provided us with that.