William Shirer was a household name by the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, his recently smuggled diaries from Germany by December 1941 a bestseller. CBS Radio spent 27 minutes curating the editorial pages of the major newspapers after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor before allowing Shirer to editorialize the coming war and scope of the totalitarian threat at the 17:00 mark.
Worth listening to in the background.
Perhaps more significantly, two press reports this week on the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor — a visit from the U.S. Secretary of Defense to assure the Japanese of the strength of the current alliance, and a non-specific pledge from Masayoshi Son (in many ways a Japanese version of Trump, only far more successful) to invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 jobs — demonstrate a certain meta-narrative at play as Japanese PM Shinzo Abe will hold a ceremony with US President Barack Obama later this month at Pearl Harbor in commemoration of the attack.
No apology will be forthcoming from the Japanese, just as no “apology” was issued for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Obama (much to the consternation of the Japanese press).