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Tragedy has struck the land that my generation regarded as the arch-enemy.

The nation that gave us Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March and the “rape of China” has been stricken by a force more powerful than the two nuclear bombs that provided the coup de grace for Imperial Japan in 1945.

And the world weeps for its dead and its suffering survivors.

Japan has transformed itself since 1945 into a democracy that plays a constructive role in world affairs. The United States has evolved from conqueror to mentor in this relationship between East and West, and the student has learned well. Perhaps it was the chastening effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; perhaps it was the benevolent rule of the occupying military under Douglas MacArthur; perhaps it was simply the reality of the huge task of turning an ash heap back into a mountain. Whatever, Japan and America have grown in friendship over the past 66 years, and the tears America weeps today over Japanese suffering are not crocodile tears.

I have lived long enough to see the metamorphosis of animosity into amity.

When I was in grade school, we were taught to hate two arch-villains: Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo.

Though the name of Tojo is no longer familiar to most Americans, it was a common execration during the 1940s. Tojo was Japan’s wartime prime minister, believed to be the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. After Japan’s surrender, he shot himself in the chest in an attempted suicide, but the bullet missed his heart. He was arrested, convicted of war crimes, and hanged.

The image of Emperor Hirohito, largely a figurehead, was refurbished following the war, and Japan cultivated a new and positive persona.

Still, I remember the time during the 1960s when the first merchant ships flying the Japanese flag sailed into Hampton Roads, where I then worked with the Norfolk newspapers. The men who manned the newspaper’s “back shop” were largely Navy veterans with World War II still raw in their memories. I heard a lot of cursing over this peaceful incursion of the Rising Sun into the lair of the U.S. Navy.

I also remember the observation of Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who, on a visit to the United States, was the guest of a hunting enthusiast who displayed a magnificent moose head on his wall.

“How could you shoot such a noble animal?” the poet asked.

“He didn’t look me in the eye,” replied the hunter.

When you look someone in the eye, it becomes hard to do him harm. And Americans and Japanese have been looking each other in the eye for more than half a century, turning their rivalry from a military to a commercial confrontation, each partaking a little of the other’s culture.

For a time, the Southern textile industry demonized Japan for sending its low-priced fabrics into the American market and snatching American jobs. I remember my embarrassment when I took a public relations job with Springs Mills, a textile giant in the Carolinas, and realized that I was wearing a shirt made from fabric imported from Japan. But even then, a Springs official admitted to me privately that Japanese cloth, though cheaper than American-made cloth, was still of high quality.

The Japanese quickly graduated from textiles to automobiles and electronics. Japanese cars soon became standard fixtures in American garages and carports, and Japanese television sets, VCRs, video games and other gadgets became commonplace in American dens and rec rooms. I now drive a Japanese automobile, one of several I’ve owned.

During the 1990s, when I was with the Mobile Press-Register in Alabama, one of the most popular members of the staff was the head of photography, a Japanese national. When Pearl Harbor Day came around, the newspaper didn’t hesitate to send him out to cover the celebration at the battleship USS Alabama, moored as a museum in Mobile Bay. When I think of the Japanese people, I no longer think of Tojo. I think of Keii Sato, and I still enjoy perusing a book of exquisite photos he took of the flora and fauna of the Mobile-Tennesaw Delta.

Today, I think of the thousands of fellow humans who died in the crushing earthquake or were washed away by the savage tsunami, and I feel for those who now live — once again — under the threat of nuclear disaster.

It doesn’t matter that they are of a different nationality, a different culture, a different racial makeup. They are humans, and their lives are dear to those who knew them and were related to them.

The words of John Donne, a poet of the 16th and 17th centuries, remind us that all inhabitants of this small planet are kinfolk:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The beginning of this century has been marked by massive tragedies, both natural and manmade. Who knows for whom the bell will toll next? Ultimately, it tolls for us all.

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson, SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com