Our church, Kotake Cho Bible Church, is a typical small Japanese church. About 20 people most Sundays. We all eat lunch together afterward, and this week I was chatting with the fellow next to me, a guy in his mid-70's I'd guess.

"Well, tomorrow's the big anniversary," he suddenly says. Huh? What anniversary? "Pearl Harbor." Oh, yeah! We'd been talking about Christmas and the kids' party we're going to do -- hadn't even entered my head. "That was quite a day. It completely shocked everyone in the country." Were you old enough to realize what was going on? "Sure, it was huge news. All us kids were running around being crazy, talking about how we were going to beat up all the Americans. But the grownups all seemed subdued. Well, not everyone - my teacher was all excited, getting us all pumped up, saying how we would win this war. But my dad just shook his head over and over. He'd say, "This is wrong. It's dumb. What in the world did we attack the Americans for? Now they're our enemies and we're having a hard enough time with the war in China. What are they thinking about?"

"And over night, you couldn't listen to jazz any more. It was outlawed. But jazz was really, really popular at that time. Some college kids would sneak into basement clubs on the fringes of Ginza. The plainclothes police went in and busted them, hauled them off to jail. That's ridiculous."

Then he wanted to know if the US soldiers, then and now, get a salary. Sure, it's not a lot, but they get paid. "The Japanese soldiers didn't get any salary. They got a little pocket money - only enough to go get a couple drinks on their day off. No money to send home. It was really tough on families. Your draft number would come up, the military police would come to your door -- "Congratulations! Your father/husband has been selected to serve the nation and the Emperor. They had to bow and scrape, acting like they'd just gotten some great honor, but on the inside they were cursing the military. They took dad away, and suddenly the family has no income. Families were starving. The mothers really had to get tough. After the fathers were all taken, then they started coming back for the sons. And all these guys came home in little boxes, ash urns. The urns would come by train to the station and the families had to go pick them up. They'd walk home caring the boxes, crying, and there'd be a whole slew of us kids trailing behind. What a zoo."

One lady in the neighborhood had all three of her sons taken away on the same day. "She went kinda of crazy for awhile. You couldn't blame her." The guy sitting across the lunch table wanted to know if they came back in boxes too. "No, actually that was the darnedest thing -- all three of her boys made it back alive. That never happened. It was like a miracle..." We were all quiet for a few seconds.

"War is hell," he said. Somebody came around with a pot of coffee, filling cups and talk drifted back to Christmas decorations and party treats...