As the jumbo jet began its laborious descent, looking exactly like a humpback whale cautiously exploring shallow water, what seemed to be a carefree honeymooning couple shared a window to take in the tourist attraction of the Arizona monument, built on top of the wreckage of the battleship sunk just Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. Jed patted Jenny's hand, as he noted to himself that nothing was ever quite what it appeared to be. They were not honeymooners, or carefree. The monument was a tomb. The symbolic flying -around the clock- of the huge American flag was a fraud.

Looking down on the stars and stripes Jed remembered reading a newspaper profile on a senior pilot for Japan Air Lines, whose weekly passenger flight from Tokyo took his directly over the sunken warship he had helped attack as an Imperial Japanese Naval Flyer on December 7th, 1941. The impression created by the reporter was that the personable pilot claimed to have felt the act of war unwise. He blamed the power-mad leadership of his country for the start of the action which had brought such disaster to his homeland.

Jed had been born during the era of "hate Japs." As a child, he remembered seeing old wartime cartoons shown at Cascade City Moviehouse, where all Japanese were portrayed as evil devils with buck teeth, and round, thick, glasses. Uncle Only's jukebox had a record so popular it wasn't changed for many years, titled You're a Sap, Mr. Jap.

"Yes, Mr. Jap, you were a sap," Jed continued this thought, for Hideki Tojo, leader of the extremist Japanese military leadership, had been a sap used by FDR, Harry Hopkins, and the American military establishment, as if a yellow marker on the playing board of power politics.

A few months before the attack on Pearl, a public opinion poll showed that 70% of all Americans were "very opposed" to any involvement in a global war. Shortly after the event, another poll showed fewer than a 2% disapproval. Roosevelt's speeches had become sermons from the mount; he was able to point a wagging finger at the indelible stain upon the Japanese character, even those born American. These Nisi had their property stolen from them, and had been locked up in American concentration camps. History showed that nothing bound a country together quite like a common hate.

Jenny's meditation, as she stared down upon the watery grave, was indicative how two people, without any form of verbal prompting, became one by sharing similar thoughts. As she explained later to Jed, she had been reminded, by the memorial, of a Japanese custom of listening to the voices of the dead. So many had died following the event that had started here, and ended with the atomic bomb, that the mysterious force of "Ichiko" surely was at work. Perhaps they had been involved in their quest for the truth from a need for the deceased to speak through the mouth of the living.