HONOLULU -- The ghostly silhouette of the USS Arizona lies just below the water's glassy green surface, bleeding a gallon of oil a day into Pearl Harbor.
Every day, 4,000 visitors take the short boat ride to the gleaming white memorial that spans the sunken ship -- a shrine, cemetery and tourist attraction all in one.
The signs that guide tourists are in Japanese and English. Several of the publications sold in the bookstore were printed in Japan. At the Arizona Memorial a few days ago, a Japanese man left this message on a comment card:
"War is cruel," he wrote. "We should never repeat anything like this again."
Even here -- at the watery gravesite of more than 1,000 USS Arizona sailors who perished in the Japanese attack a half-century ago -- there are unmistakable reminders of the symbiosis of Japan and the United States.
Especially so here, in a Hawaii that then and now cannot look itself in the mirror without seeing a Japan looking back.
*
HONOLULU, DEC. 7, 1941: It was a sunny Sunday morning in this Pacific paradise whose advertising slogan promised "a world of happiness in an ocean of peace."
George Akita, then 15, was still relishing his first-prize win two days earlier in a territory-wide essay contest sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The topic: Americanism.
As the young Japanese-American was preparing for Bible school, the sounds of anti-aircraft fire burst through the morning silence.
After the firing ended, a frightened George Akita walked slowly, tentatively, to Bible school.
"I didn't know what else to do. I saw one of the civilian victims on the sidewalk. He was dead. There was broken glass everywhere. I kept walking," said Mr. Akita, a scholar of Japanese history and retired University of Hawaii professor.
It was a confusing time for Hawaii's 160,000 residents of Japanese ancestry, who made up 40 percent of the territory's population and provided most of its plantation workers, grocers, restaurant workers and shopkeepers.
"There was no question in my mind or my parents' minds to whom we owed allegiance: the U.S. But culturally, I was confused," Mr. Akita said. "My parents had imbued me with Japanese virtues of hard work and forbearance. Culturally, I thought like a Japanese. On that day, however, I didn't know what to think. I just kept walking."
That same morning, in a grassy clearing near a pineapple plantation a couple of miles from Wheeler Army Air Base, 14-year-old Elwood Craddock was hunting pheasant.
"All of a sudden, there were all these planes 500 feet above our heads," said Mr. Craddock, now a golf course marshal at the Mid-Pacific Country Club. "They started their bombing pattern right above our heads. One of the planes was so close I could see the gunner's helmet. It reminded me of a coconut. Then, the ground started kicking up, bullets started ricocheting, and I started running."
Later, Mr. Craddock and his father, who supervised the plantation's workers, took their shotguns and patrolled the grounds after being warned by the military that their mostly Japanese laborers would probably join the "invaders."
"One day, these boys were my playmates," Mr. Craddock said. "The next day, I was ready to shoot the kids I had grown up with."
That afternoon, the Craddock family piled mattresses on top of the sturdy pine trestle table in their dining room. Underneath the table that night, a frightened family tried to sleep.
In downtown Honolulu, 11-year-old Roland Kanami Tatsuguchi opened his front door that evening to three armed soldiers who promptly arrested his father, the Buddhist leader of the Shinshu Kyokai Mission of Hawaii.
The boy did not see his father, who was interned at camps on the mainland 2,300 miles away, until 5 1/2 years later.
Today, the Rev. Roland Kanami Tatsuguchi is the minister at the Buddhist mission his late father once tended. Services are held in English and Japanese.
"It was a troubling time," he said about the years of incarceration for his father, one of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans interned during the war. "I suppose they were cutting the head off the chicken. I do not know. It is something my father never spoke about."
Near Diamond Head, Edith Ring was preparing breakfast for her husband, an Army doctor, and their three children. They marveled over coffee at the loudness of the thunder bursts that had interrupted the morning calm before Capt. Harold Ring rushed off to work at Tripler Army Hospital.
His shirt bloodied and the car engine still running, Captain Ring ran into the house a few hours later and gave his wife a pistol. "Use it if you need it," he told her.
Then he returned to duty, where the doctor, who died in 1965, was to later record in his physician's diary:
"[A soldier] told me the attack was by the Japs and many had been wounded. Poor devil. I doubt whether he lived long after I finished. We were amputating legs, arms and closing perforations of the bowels. The operating room soon became a slippery, bloody mess."
Between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Dec. 7, Captain Ring delivered two babies under the glow of a flashlight. Their mothers had been in labor all day.
Mrs. Ring, 74, says she still wonders: "What happened to the babies, the Pearl Harbor babies?"
*
AT THE ARIZONA MEMORIAL visitor center, volunteer guide Richard Fiske was talking to a tourist in the museum recently when a man came up to him, pounded his chest and said: "I'm Japanese! I'm Japanese!'
Then, said Mr. Fiske, a retired Marine who is a survivor of the bombing, "He put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'I'm sorry.' Then he put his hand on my other shoulder and said, 'I'm so very sorry.' "
That was the first time a Japanese had ever apologized to Mr. Fiske for Pearl Harbor, verbal shorthand in the American lexicon for treachery.
A second apology came two weeks ago when Mr. Fiske, who was a bugler on the USS West Virginia, gave a tour to Iwao Fujihara, the Japanese pilot who bombed his ship.
"When he saw photographs of that day, he just broke down and cried," said Mr. Fiske, who will join President Bush for services at the memorial today. "We went to the memorial, and he looked at the names of the dead. He said his prayers in Japanese and bowed. He couldn't really speak English, but his tears said it for him: 'I'm sorry.' "
For the past few days, thousands of Pearl Harbor survivors here for the 50-year anniversary have wandered through a maze of sometimes pleasant but oftentimes painful memories.
At the Pearl City Tavern, a bar popular with servicemen in the 1940s, 68-year-old Everett Cook of Logansport, Ind., took in the sushi bar and the karaoke bar, a sing-along bar popular in Japan. In one room a group of military wives dined, in another room a Japanese tour group.
The establishment, surrounded by sugar cane fields when Mr. Cook frequented the place 50 years ago, is on a busy commercial strip of fast food restaurants, banks and shops. It's now owned by Japanese nationals.
"Something's happened to the aloha spirit," the former Navy man said. "To put it frankly: too many Japanese."
So visible are things Japanese in the state's culture and economy that some say there wouldn't be a Hawaii without a Japan. There are Japanese-language TV, restaurants, churches, golf courses, groceries.
Japanese companies own half the office space in downtown Honolulu and most of the hotels on Waikiki, including the Sheraton, where the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association had its headquarters this week.
It's a love-hate relationship: Mayor Frank Fasi has derided the Japanese for trying to turn Honolulu into a "Tokyo suburb," yet a week ago he was in Japan urging investors to continue backing projects here.
Richard Ishimoto, a 71-year-old Japanese-American who served in World War II with the much-decorated 442nd Infantry Regiment, now serves as caretaker at three mansions near Diamond Head that are used as vacation retreats by their Japanese owners.
"The Japanese have come in and they're building houses like battleships around my home. We won the war, but look who I'm working for now," said Mr. Ishimoto. "It does make you remember Pearl Harbor."
*
THREE DAYS AGO, Pearl Harbor survivor Robert Stephen Hudson, a Honolulu historian, flew to Nagasaki, Japan, to participate in a peace mission. For Mr. Hudson, the memories of the attack were so compelling that he moved here six years ago to begin his own historical record.
"After 50 years, we should lay this thing to rest," he now says. "It's wrong to go on hating, hating, hating. I think the 50th anniversary will be the last hurrah for the survivors. I think that's the way it should be."