Greece is called Hellas; and the nation Japan is called Nippon or Nihon by its people.
Nippon means Sun’s Rising Place, the sound of which changed to “Jipang” in the era of Marco Polo (the 13th century) and finally to “Japan” mostly in the West. But, the old imperial court of Japan has been traditionally called the Yamato Regime, for capitals of ancient Japan were mainly located in the Yamato Area (currently Nara Prefecture south of Kyoto).
When Japan built the world’s largest and strongest battle ship, it was named Yamato. The ship weighed 64,000t and was equipped with the nine 46.0cm battery guns. There were no matching counterparts in the US Navy in 1941 (USS New Jersey 48,000t with nine 40.6cm battery guns) when the Yamato was put into operation.
However, eventually, the Yamato was downed in 1945 during a kind of Kamikaze mission for the battle of Okinawa.
It has been a legendary battle ship, because the Yamato was and will remain to be the world’s largest and strongest battleship forever and ever, since the age of large battleships was gone once and for all during WWII.
The Yamato has been featured many times in various works of Japanese popular art. This year, it is said, another movie featuring the battleship is going to be released.
So, it was not an easy game for the US Navy to sweep away the Imperial Japan’s Navy during WWII. Even when a crew of a US submarine needed an emergency operation for appendicitis, a captain should be well aware of tactical situation.
April 2005, a man who had actually performed this kind of operation under the South China Sea in 1942 died in the U.S. His story was not new, since George Weller on board of the submarine reported it and got awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his work.
However, recently George Weller surfaced again and was focused upon in a Japanese newspaper. It was not for his Prize-winning reporting on the submarine hero but for his long-hidden report on Nagasaki, an atomic-bombed city the writer visited just after the surrender of the Empire of Japan.
Nagasaki, a historic port city known for tradition of Catholicism in Japan since the 16th century, is one of major shipbuilding cities, and it was so during WWII. George Weller came to the city to discover the scale of catastrophes of an atomic bomb. He checked situations in hospitals and recorded symptoms of victims suffering from horrible effect of radioactivity.
His report was sent for permission of publication to the Headquarter of the Allied forces in Tokyo but forbidden to be released. The report was not returned to George Weller and seemed to be lost somewhere. Censorship seemed to be exercised.
After George Weller died in 2002, his son found a copy of the report in Rome where the writer had lived his last days.
It is effect of radioactivity that should be hidden from the public eye. If American people had been alerted on fatal side-effect of an atomic bomb, further development of atomic bombs might have been hindered due to wide public opposition.
If the report had been made public in 1940’s, today’s issue on depleted uranium might have been avoided; and many modern US soldiers might have been relieved from the terrible side-effect.
Recently a very old, former FBI deputy director has also surfaced in the U.S. as a key information source to heroic reporters who pursued the plot linked to then President Nixon. George Weller and the former FBI deputy director seem to belong to the same generation.
The former’s secret was intended to be hidden forever, but the latter’s secret has been revealed by the very person himself 30 years after the notorious incident involoving resignation of President Nixon.
The two secrets might be just one of aftermath effects of the Pearl Harbor attack and the JFK assassination, respectively, both of which made the moment when people had first heard the news unforgettable for them.
“I APPEARED TO THOSE WHO WERE NOT LOOKING FOR ME.”
(Source of Information: The Mainichi Shimbun newspaper)