Day Three: Pearl Harbor- “Tora Tora Tora” by Jessica Cervini

Posted for Jessica:    Today we took public transportation to Pearl Harbor. We took the bus for only $2.50 from our hotel to the memorial, which took about an hour. The memorial offers many different ways to learn about Pearl Harbor from the USS Arizona Memorial Narrated Tour to the on site museums.

The USS Arizona Memorial is built on top of the remains of the sunken battleship, USS Arizona, which is the resting place for the 1,177 crewman who lost their life on December 7, 1941 when their ship was bombed by the Japanese Naval Forces. I know for myself that I did not speak when I was there, rather I looked around at the shoreline and just thought about how lucky I am to live in a country where I have freedom due to the men and women who gave up their lives. I also thought about how 9/11 is similar in the sense that they were both catalysts to major wars and were both unexpected. When in the museum, there was a section about how when a noise was made on December 7th night, everybody in their households would run downstairs and hide in hidden shelters. I related the video I watched to how scared I felt after 9/11 happened to another possible attack because of how close I live to the city and both of my parents working there.

The museum had lots of helpful information about the attack but also about WW2. It talked about how radar played a huge part in the war. It was a new technology that transmitted radio waves that would bounce off an object and allow the Army to capture the object’s range, location and size. A fact that I found really interesting is how they put barb wire around Waikiki beach. That definitely took away from the beauty of the beach.

For Pearl Harbor we had a reading called “Memorializing Pu’uloa and Remembering Pearl Harbor. The reading connected to the visit about how the loyalty of the AJA (American Japanese) was questioned. The United States Army made the AJA wear black badges. In one of the videos in the museum a AJA man talked about how this made him sad and disappointed. He said “it felt like the very bottom dropped out of our lives.” This was another way that the Hawaiians had their identity questioned.

After Pearl Harbor, my group and I went parasailing while another group went to North Shore!

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