I was born in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation in World War II. Hong Kong then was a British colony. The Sikhs who were left behind to protect British interests were no match for the Japanese Imperial Army.
As a young girl, I saw starved, emaciated bodies on our street. I still have a scar on my finger from a deep cut I got while pulling an empty sardine can from my sister's hand for the last drops of oil.
My head was shaved to make me look like a little boy, as the horror of the systematic rape of women in Nanking struck terror throughout Asia. I learned to say "Thank you, thank you" in Japanese as the soldiers burst through our doors to do their searches day or night.
At least 20 million Chinese civilians, and millions of other Asians, died in World War II because of Japan's dream to become the true master of what were then militarily weak and poor Asian nations.
America was then an inward-looking country, interested in its own nation building, and it only belatedly joined the Western allies in the war. The beginning of Japan's full-scale aggression in China in 1937 received scant interest in America. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought America into the war.
The atomic bomb that brought horrific destruction four years later quickly ended the protracted bloody Pacific Rim battles and ultimately spared more Japanese civilians from a final invasion of their motherland, while liberating millions under Japanese occupation.
Over more than half a century, the Japanese government has successfully focused on rehabilitating its standing in the powerful West by portraying Japan as a "victim" of the atomic bomb. Many in the West who saw the devastation (photos in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, with no accompanying explanations of how the war began in Asia) felt "guilty" as America, the first country that used the "bomb," accepted Japan's claim of victimhood. Few in the West cared much about the 30-million-plus civilian casualties as a result of Japanese aggression.
Morally, can one argue that death from being repeatedly gang-raped, or at the hands of saber-wielding Japanese soldiers in a game, or from starvation when there was no more bark on the trees to eat was more acceptable than quick death from blast and radiation? Aren't other Asian lives lost to Japan's wanton killing just as valuable as the Japanese lives lost as Japan waged war against its neighbors? Will President Obama answer this question when he visits Hiroshima? Some 3.8 million Americans of Chinese descent, and millions more Asian-Americans, await his answer.
