He told me that the director, an ex general, was squiring a group of
Japanese journalists around the center (date of this incident not
mentioned). When they passed the Enola Gay, some of the journalists
spoke up and said that they were offended by the display, saying that
the bomber had dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.

The ex general asked them what they thought about Pearl Harbor. The
Japanese, all journalists, were bewildered. "What about Pearl
Harbor?" They asked.

It's just barely possible that something like this did happen. The
NASM director is actually an admiral. There were certainly a lot of
Japanese visiting Udvar-Hazy when I was there in January. They
clustered around the Ohta suicide flying bomb and other relicts of the
JAAF and JNAF, and of course on the walkway over Enola Gay. (You cna't
get to it on the ground level, and there's a barrier to discourage
folks from throwing things from the walkway.)

I'm sure however that every Japanese journalist knows about the Pearl
Harbor attack. If something like this conversation took place, it
almost certainly meant: "What has our conventional and justifiable
attack on a military target have to do with your incincerating one of
our larger cities?"

Anyhow, it's not just the Japanese. The sour joke about American high
schools is that the students learn two facts about World War Two in
the Pacific: 1) that the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, and 2) so the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

My visit to Udvar Hazy is posted at www.warbirdforum.com/udvarhaz.htm

(Enola Gay is visible just beneath the Super Cub


all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

The Warbird's Forum www.warbirdforum.com
The Piper Cub Forum www.pipercubforum.com