In the early 1970s, when I was approaching school age, my mother needed some flooring laid in our home and hired a man named Ockie to do the work. I remember little about him other than that he was the first person of Japanese descent whom I had seen in my young life. Years later, she told me that Ockie had been interned as a youngster, along with his parents, in California during the war. “He was very angry about it,” she remembered; he had pointed out that his father was an American citizen. At the time, all I knew was that Ockie was Japanese, and that America had fought the Japanese, but that we were friends now, as my mother assured me. Adults were funny: they blew things up to the heavens and then sat in quiet kitchens, pricing linoleum by the square foot.
Even then, I knew the two words—Pearl Harbor—and I had images to go with them, especially that of the smoldering USS Arizona, pictures of which I'd seen in the World Book encyclopedia. Pearl Harbor meant “sneak attack” and December 7, 1941, a “date which will live in infamy.” I had heard Franklin Roosevelt's voice saying these words, his cadence sealing them into permanent memory. In the original draft of this speech, the president had written that the day would live in “world history,” but he struck that phrase in favor of the archaic-sounding, morally fearsome “infamy.” You didn't need to know what the word meant. You only needed to hear him say it.
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