My wife decided a couple of years ago that when we turn 55, we should pick a place we’ve always wanted to go to, and just do it. She’s eight months older than me, so her turn came first. For her 55th birthday, we went to Japan.
When I turn 55 this February, I hope to go to Israel. Gosia isn’t sure it’ll be the best time with everything going on in the Middle East right now, but we’ll see. Even if we go somewhere else for my birthday, we’ll eventually go to Israel.
We had a great time in Japan and I want to give a big shoutout to Inspired Travel for putting our tour together. We started in Kyoto, worked our way south, and then looped back north to finish in Tokyo. It’s hard to say what the best part of the trip was, but the parts I want to write about are the Peace Museums in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, both of which we visited.
It wasn’t my first time visiting a gut-wrenching place. Years ago, after seeing Auschwitz, I wrote about that experience, and when I was stationed in Germany I visited Dachau as well.
Everyone learns something at a place like Auschwitz or Hiroshima, but my fear is that it’s easy to learn the wrong lessons, and this is an excerpt of what I wrote after visiting Auschwitz:
Auschwitz is not just about Nazi atrocities, but about every instance of mass, organized death, and the world has seen that many times. There is a plaque in the main entrance to the museum that reads, “Those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it,” which makes this case very clear. Auschwitz exists to remind each and every one of us that we have the capacity to commit such acts of horror, that good and evil are choices – choices human beings often make poorly. Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier made the wrong choice in Haiti. Radovan Karadzic made the wrong choice in Bosnia.
To consign Auschwitz to the past is to ignore the cases of genocide occurring right now in Myanmar, where the Rohingya are being exterminated; in Sudan, where the Nuer and other minorities are being exterminated; in Iraq and Syria, where Christians and Yazidis are being exterminated; in the Central African Republic, where both Christians and Muslims are being exterminated. And yes, again in Sudan, where the Darfuris are still being exterminated. How can we pretend that we have learned from Auschwitz, when similar atrocities are happening right now – even as I type this – in at least five nations?
Hundreds of millions have died in state-run systems of mass murder, forced labor, and engineered starvation since Auschwitz was liberated, many at the hands of regimes like the one that liberated it. It’s a little-known fact that some of the 7,000 people liberated there later died in Siberian gulags, yet while we have a plaque commemorating the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz, there is nothing calling out the Soviets for killing the survivors.
We have learned nothing. That’s why genocide continues unchecked, and why large numbers of American youth commemorate communists.
We have learned nothing. That’s why Auschwitz leaves me more angry than sad. I am sad, of course. But I’m also angry, unspeakably so, because as I saw the vastness of Auschwitz II–Birkenau, I could not only see the faces of the people who died there, but also the faces of those who have died since, and who will die today, because you and I, collectively, have learned nothing.
I was remembering Auschwitz as I walked around the sites of the only two cities ever destroyed by atomic bombs.
I didn’t come to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cast judgment, but I did come as someone shaped by a warrior tradition in the ethos of the United States Marine Corps, and I have always been fascinated by how the broader ‘warrior code’ spans cultures, including the Bushidō of Japan’s samurai and the chivalry of Europe’s knights.
A warrior must have disciplined courage to stand between others and danger. These traditions speak a common language of honor, restraint, loyalty, and sacrifice, and these are values that still matter.
My background shaped how I walked through the peace museums.
The museums are reverent and powerful. They tell of children incinerated in seconds, families shattered, and survivors scarred by radiation. It is heartbreaking; these are stories that must be remembered.
But as I moved through the exhibits, I felt something was missing. It wasn’t compassion, or sincerity.
It was context.
There was sorrow, but no sense of cause. Destruction, yes, but no understanding of how the war began or why it ended as it did, making the narrative mournful, but also incomplete.
This essay doesn’t question remembering the victims. It pleads for remembering all of them, and remembering honestly, because a warrior code that honors sacrifice but ignores responsibility can quickly become something dangerous. Moral evasion led Japan to invade Korea and Taiwan, and to bomb Pearl Harbor. So we must remember not only the bombs, but the reasons they were dropped.
The Narrative Within: What’s Remembered—and What Isn’t
The Peace Museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki do what they set out to do: evoke the horror of nuclear war and leave you with a longing for peace. What they don’t do is explain how we came to war. Japan’s own actions, including its aggression, war crimes, and refusal to surrender, are conspicuously absent or mentioned only in passing.
The result is a one-sided story. Japan appears not as a nation that waged war across half of Asia, but as one that simply suffered at the hands of a terrible new weapon. It isn’t overtly dishonest, but it is subtly disorienting. You don’t walk away with the wrong facts, but you do walk away with only half the truth.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrifying. Tens of thousands died instantly. Others lingered for days or years in unimaginable pain. Children lost parents. Parents lost children. The fire, radiation, and long-term suffering defy words. These were human beings. Even worse, they were noncombatants who bore the ultimate cost of decisions made by others.
Their suffering deserves full recognition, and that recognition must not depend on political context, but understanding that context is still essential if we are to learn anything from what happened.
By mid-1945, Japan had lost militarily, and yet refused to surrender. Allied planners expected a land invasion of the Japanese home islands to cost as many as two million Japanese lives and hundreds of thousands of Allied troops.
The bombs were not dropped casually. They were used to avoid an even greater bloodbath. That doesn’t make them righteous, but it does make them part of an impossible calculus, one that cannot be understood without acknowledging Japan’s refusal to surrender.
Pearl Harbor: The Forgotten Catalyst
While many in the West associate World War II in the Pacific with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the conflict began years earlier. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and its full-scale war with China beginning in 1937 marked the true onset of Japanese aggression in Asia. One could argue, in fact, that it was the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and not the invasion of Poland in 1939, that marked the beginning of World War Two.
The December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor did not start the war, but it did draw the United States into it when over 2,400 Americans were killed in an unprovoked assault designed to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet and enable Japan’s unchecked imperial expansion.
Some in Japan’s leadership reportedly considered invading Hawaii and even the U.S. mainland. That idea was abandoned after Admiral Yamamoto (ironically the architect of Pearl Harbor) allegedly warned, ‘You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.’
Admiral Yamamoto studied in America and had firsthand knowledge of the size of our manufacturing sector. He was very clear to his superiors that even a perfect strike on our Pacific Fleet would only buy Japan a free hand for six months, and recommended a strategy of rapid conquest, seizing as much territory as possible, as quickly as possible, before suing for peace.
For Americans, Pearl Harbor became the moral starting point, but the only ‘exit strategy’ went through Tokyo, especially once we learned of the atrocities Japan committed against those they invaded and our captured soldiers.
In the Japanese museums, Pearl Harbor is treated as a footnote if it is mentioned at all. This selective memory distorts the moral arc of the war.
What ended in nuclear fire began much earlier in blood and conquest. That’s the lesson that can help prevent future wars.
Japan’s Wartime Atrocities: Remembering the Forgotten Victims
The suffering Japan endured in 1945 was real, but so was the suffering it caused. In Nanking, Japanese troops murdered over 200,000 civilians and raped tens of thousands of women. In Unit 731, doctors performed live vivisections and biological weapons tests on Chinese civilians and Allied POWs. The ‘comfort women’ system institutionalized sexual slavery across occupied Asia.
Prisoners of war were routinely executed, starved, or worked to death. Cannibalism occurred in some theaters. These were not battlefield mistakes, but state policy, enforced by officers, and justified through ideology.
Japan has never fully reckoned with its wartime past, and in the museums of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that past is almost entirely absent.
That absence isn’t limited to museums. It echoes in classrooms, textbooks, and even in the way some in the West talk about the war.
When I was twelve I asked my parents if we could start attending church. My parents were atheists, so they picked People’s Church, which sometimes called itself the ‘Church of Man.’ This church operated less like a religion and more like a hard-left political cult.
The last time we went I was fourteen, and in youth group we were tasked with writing apologies to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I refused. When pressed, I simply said, “Japan should have thought about getting its butt kicked before it bombed Pearl Harbor.”
The youth leaders told my father, but atheist or not, my father was also a history teacher and apologizing for how that war ended was a bridge too far, even for him. We never went to church again.
My youthful bombast missed the nuance, but not the principle. Even then, I sensed that memory without context was a lie, and therein we find another lesson: total war blurs every moral boundary.
The Allies committed their share of wrongs too.
The United Kingdom led the firebombing of cities like Dresden, where tens of thousands of German civilians were killed in a matter of hours.
The United States conducted firebombing raids across Japan, including Tokyo, and interned Japanese-Americans without trial. Some U.S. troops also committed battlefield atrocities.
The United States was the only country in the war that routinely strafed parachuting pilots.
The Soviet Union looted its way through Eastern Europe, raping over a million German women and conducting mass executions and deportations. Nazi Germany industrialized genocide against the European Jewish community, murdering millions in concentration camps, ghettos, and fields. The six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazis were only half the total killed in concentration camps. China committed its own atrocities during internal conflicts between Nationalist and Communist forces.
No side was pure, but there is a huge difference between committing evil in war, and waging war in service of evil.
No nation emerges from total war unstained. But just as important as what was done is what happens after the war ends, and though Germany remembered its part in starting the war, Japan forgot.
Bushidō, Chivalry, and the Marine Corps Ethos
As someone shaped by the Marine Corps, much of what I saw in Japan echoed values I already knew. The code of Bushidō with its courage, honor, loyalty, and discipline, closely resembles the values Marines are taught to live by, honoring sacrifice while preaching restraint and holding duty above self.
When I was in the Marine Corps, what I feared most was the possibility of dishonoring all of those who wore the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor before me. I believe that is true of all Marines, and probably of all who ascribe to any warrior culture. The problem is that if the warrior code is applied only inward, to one’s own tribe, unit, or nation, the very traits that define being a warrior can become excuses for atrocity.
When applied tribally, Bushidō allowed Japanese soldiers to butcher POWs. A code of honor means nothing if it does not recognize the enemy’s humanity.
A warrior needs to see the enemy as dangerous, but still human. Only a bloodthirsty killer sees the enemy as nothing more than an object to be destroyed. That distinction defines whether a code restrains violence or enables it.
That’s where modern Japan’s narrative falls short. It remembers its dead, but not those it killed. It honors its warriors, but not the code they violated.
Through Enemy Eyes: How Japanese Soldiers Saw U.S. Marines
The Pacific War was not merely a clash of empires. It was a collision of warrior codes as well. Japanese soldiers were steeped in Bushidō, a martial ethic that demanded loyalty unto death and viewed surrender as the deepest shame.
American propaganda painted the Japanese as fanatical, and Japanese propaganda painted Americans as soft.
But the battlefield told a more complicated story.
Many Japanese soldiers came to respect their American enemies, and especially the U.S. Marines, not in spite of the savagery of the fighting, but because of it. Beneath the fire and blood, they saw something familiar: warriors who fought, bled, and died by their own code.
> “The Americans on this island are not ordinary troops, but Marines, a special force recruited from jails and insane asylums for bloodlust.”
— Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima, cited in I’m Staying With My Boys by Jim Proser
What was meant as slander doubles as reluctant respect. The Japanese soldier who wrote that did not see cowards. He saw men who would not stop.
Another Japanese soldier wrote:
> “They advance without fear of death, with a strange madness in their eyes. It is as if they welcome the bullets.”
— Anonymous journal, recovered from Saipan
Even Japanese ace Saburō Sakai, who had nothing but contempt for American air tactics early in the war, later admitted his admiration for the bravery and tenacity of American pilots and infantry as the tide turned. He wrote of his opponents with both respect and clarity, acknowledging their growing skill and their will to fight.
These moments of recognition matter. War often reduces the enemy to something less than human, but occasionally, across the noise and fire, a soldier sees in his adversary the mirror of his own values. Perhaps he does not see the same politics or the same homeland, but he sees the same code.
It is a bitter irony that two warrior cultures met in such horrific ways. Both honored courage. Both revered sacrifice. But one side extended its code to its enemies while the other dehumanized them.
That distinction explains much about how the war was fought, and how it was remembered by those who were there.
Warrior Culture Is Not Dead—and War Will Come Again
Japan today is a peaceful nation, but the discipline and order that define its culture, the same traits that once fueled its war machine, are still there.
Warrior culture doesn’t just disappear. Sometimes it merely sleeps.
The same is true in the West. The U.S. still produces warriors but increasingly, our society does not know what to do with them. Many Americans see masculinity as toxic, forgetting why warrior code matters.
There will, however, be future wars and what nations remember, as well as what they choose to forget, will shape how they fight.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unspeakable tragedies. The civilians who died deserve to be mourned and remembered, but Japan was not simply a victim. It was also an aggressor, and one that inflicted vast suffering across Asia, refusing to surrender until faced with annihilation.
Some nations came out of that war determined to remember. Others came out determined to forget. The danger lies not in remembering the bombs, but in forgetting everything that came before them.
The danger comes in forgetting the cause.
Peace is not born of silence, but of truth, and warriors, more than anyone, owe allegiance to it.
Let me close by quoting from my earlier work, Lessons from Auschwitz:
Auschwitz, today, is almost a theme park to our species’ special ability to kill our fellow man. People say that we must never let anything like that happen again, and yet it is happening, even as I write this, today.
If we fail to learn from history, and not just remember it, but act on it to stop atrocities as they happen, our fear shouldn’t be simply that we’ll repeat the past. We must fear something worse: that others will study history the way Rudolph Hoss did. Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, didn’t learn that killing was wrong. He learned how to kill more efficiently. His regret, recorded later, wasn’t moral, but logistical. He hadn’t been able to apply what he’d learned to build an even deadlier camp.
At Auschwitz I, a hangman’s platform stands beside the gas chamber. That was built after the war, specifically to hang Rudolph Hoss, and unlike so many other German war criminals, Rudolph Hoss died right next to where he had killed his victims, within a couple hundred meters of the house he lived in while serving as commandant of Auschwitz.
Who will hold accountable those committing such atrocities today? Who will teach the people waving Soviet flags and wearing Che Guevara shirts that they are asking for the same atrocities tomorrow? Who will force us to learn from history such that we do not continue to repeat it?
I fear no one will. There are still too many communists, and they are unwilling to see the parallels between Auschwitz and similar facilities everywhere communism has been tried.
Until more people are willing to learn, Auschwitz will remain less a memory than a warning unheeded, and with people around the world celebrating Hamas with calls of ‘From the River to the Sea,’ the need for moral clarity, rooted in something larger than ourselves, has never been more urgent.
