As he works feverishly to liberate X from the Scourge of the Bots, Mr. Musk recently deployed a capability on Xitter which automatically translates Japanese Xweets. If you’ve ever intimately known a Japanese person, the results are as adorable and odd as you’d expect.
The article, by the pseudonymous (I hope) “Harambe Harambe,” is titled “The bromance between Japan and America reached new levels this weekend as we bonded over grilled meats and mass deportations.” At its climax, Harambe2 quotes “Captain S.O,” who appears to be an elderly Japanese man: What Japanese people wanted most from America was to help them get beyond the guilt of the war years.
Ironically (but, in retrospect, utterly unsurprisingly), all it took was a little bit of sh*t-talking from President Trump in the Oval Office. Mr. Trump was hosting the new Japanese Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, a protégé of legendary “Japan First” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
America had just launched its second sneak attack on Iran in a month, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that a Japanese reporter challenged Mr. Trump on the matter. In a scene surely to be remembered as a watershed moment in U.S.-Japanese relations as consequential as the U.S.-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty of 1960, Mr. Trump replied:
We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?[1]
At this point in my article, I feel like it’s appropriate to make a full disclosure: My Dad was stationed at a U.S. Air Force listening station in Miyakojima, about halfway between Okinawa and Taiwan, in the mid-1960s. After learning fluent Japanese and doing his part, he subsequently studied at the Jesuit University in Tokyo (Sophia).[2]
As is our family tradition, my Dad never lived in an “American ghetto,” either down in the Okinawan Islands[3] or while my family lived in the Ichigaya District of Tokyo.[4] “I could have spent my entire time at the American Club, Bubba,” my Dad once explained to me. “But why even live in a foreign country if you’re not going to live there?”
Under the G.I. Bill, my Mom, Dad, and siblings lived like kings. But even a Queen can be forgiven for being utterly terrified when Tokyo was hit by a “minor” earthquake in 1967. My Dad finished his degree at Mt. Angel Teachers’ College.
Even though my family had returned to our ancestral farm outside of Mt. Angel, I spent my entire childhood immersed in Japanese culture. The friends my parents had made in Tokyo – Tosh Haziyama, Ewao Sato, Shozo Kuwashima – were obsessed with the limitless openness of America. To them, America represented a place where new beginnings were possible. (Plus, my Mom was famous for her sukiyaki.)
Eventually, I ended up studying Japanese criminal law and writing the standard reference, “Suggestions for U.S. Servicemembers in Japanese Criminal Proceedings,” for our misbehaving servicemembers stationed in Japan[5]
I confess that I am partial to the Japanese; and I wonder how much of that partiality emerged out of my confusion at the fact that my Dad’s friends had to apologize for events that happened when they were babies, but no one ever asked Dad to apologize on behalf of our people.[6]
Harambe2’s article resonates with my lifelong sense that the Japanese (and, later, the Germans and South Africans) of today have been treated with the worst kind of unfairness: Being enslaved for eternity for political decisions that were made before they were born.
Countless German friends have told me, “Daniel, you don’t understand. It would be inconceivable for me to say what you just said.”[7]
As all true Americans intuitively understand, sometimes “F*ck you, that’s why” is a perfectly reasonable response to those who would exploit the most painful parts of a country’s history – stripped of context, graciousness, or charity – to perpetually fuel their own (invariably self-righteous and frequently grifting) agenda.[8]
As I have often had to remind my America-hating friends, both here and abroad: “I never owned a slave, drowned a kitten, murdered a Jew, or beat up a gay person, so I don’t know what you want from me.”
Heck, even 1994 (when white South Africans voluntarily ended Apartheid) was a long time ago. (Neither of my kids had even been born when my German-South African wife cast her first vote ever. To end Apartheid and consign South Africa to “majority rule.”)[9]
Believe it or not, 1865 (when white America decided to sacrifice 10% of all fighting-age men in the entire country to end de jure slavery—a world first) is even longer ago.[10] So please forgive me for not wanting to pay reparations to uber-millionairess Kamala Harris, especially since my great-great Granddaddy, Zenas Primrose Crowe, was a Union Cavalryman in the Civil War (and her great-great Granddaddies didn’t even live in America).[11]
The events of 1945 fall in the middle, and I’ve got to be honest: Pretending that the Japanese and the Germans are “uniquely bad” is not just wrong. It is evil.
Which gets us to a recent frolic and detour I made to Israel—ostensibly to complete a first draft of my novel The Mirrors of the Soul.
I was there for 3½ weeks before the President arrived on October 13th and departed 3½ weeks after he left—living in a Jewish hippie peacenik enclave in the Upper Galilee but spending most of my time with my Druze brothers (with an occasional check-in with Prior Joseph and his fellow German Benedictine monks at Tabgha Priory, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.[12]).
All decent human beings are taught, correctly, that the judicial murder of Jesus Christ in a political conspiracy between powerful Jews and Roman military authority does not – cannot – justify violence against Jews.[13] And that is 100% true: My Master was a devout and observant Jew—as were all of His disciples, His stepfather, and our Mother.
Blood guilt – the idea that “the sins of the father” should be visited on the son – is wrong when applied to Jews.[14] (My self-righteous friends used to understand that…although, sadly, many of them changed their minds as soon as the Ministry of Truth realized that liking Jews was no longer politically advantageous.)
But if blood guilt is wrong as a matter of principle, then why should it be applied to people who have never done anything wrong—whether those people happen to be Japanese or German or South African?
Or American?
Perhaps the reason why America is called “the indispensable country” is because the world needs one country – now more than ever – where blood guilt isn’t just categorically rejected.
It’s inconceivable.
[1] White House Briefing Room, Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Takaichi of Japan in Joint Press Gaggle, March 19, 2026.
Mr. Trump’s “Pearl Harbor” retort was widely reported as a moment of “unapologetic sovereignty” that bypassed traditional diplomatic niceties. Well, that’s largely how it was reported in the Japanese press. The apparatchiks in America’s Ministry of Truth, unsurprisingly, acted as if Mr. Trump had murdered PM Takaiichi in the Oval Office.
[2] He was also a Japanese television personality, but that’s a story for a different day.
[3] The Okinawan Islands were returned to Japanese sovereignty on May 15, 1972, under the Okinawa Reversion Agreement.
[4] In the Japan of the mid-1960s, memories of devastation we had wrought wasn’t ancient history. Between March 9th and 10th of 1945, 279 B-29 Superfortresses of the U.S. Army Air Force XXI Bomber Command converged on Tokyo in Operation MEETINGHOUSE. We firebombed a Tokyo which was almost entirely made of wood, killing an estimated 100,000 Japanese in a single night—a death toll exceeding the immediate fatalities of either Hiroshima (70-80k dead) or Nagasaki (40-60k dead), which we vaporized five months later.
In the months that followed, probably one million Japanese civilians – no one will ever know for sure – succumbed to a combination of our total blockade of the Japanese Home Islands and the lack of shelter.
Operation MEETINGHOUSE remains the deadliest single air raid in human history, but to refrain from breaking the Japanese people would have worse than a crime. It would have been a blunder, because – in war – second place means you’re dead. General Sherman, in his letter to the Mayor of Atlanta in September 1864, wrote: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
[5] 21% of all Japanese people who commit a homicide never spend any time in jail, provided they follow what I have coined as the “Japanese Rituals of Absolution”: Confess, Apologize, Plead Guilty, Compensate the Victim’s Family. But commit two (or more) homicides? The odds are pretty high that you’re going to get unceremoniously strung by a Japanese justice system that sees murahatchibu (literally, “time away from the village,” but better understood as “exile”) as – literally – a fate worse than death.
Needless to say, the American habit of “lawyering up” is not always a wise move in a country in which the average G.I. sticks out like a sore thumb, Omawari-san (“Mr. Look-around”) is in a koban (police box) seemingly every 50′, and everyone is constantly watching everyone else.
[6] I always knew I was going to be a Warrior-Monk; and, as a child, I can remember being perplexed by why only the Japanese were expected to be sorry for attacking a U.S. military installation. Admittedly, 68 civilians died in the Japanese “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; but the United States came out way ahead on both the civilian (553k-3.1M dead to our 12,935) and military (1.74M dead to our 111,606) “force-exchange ratios,” as we euphemistically call “killing people.”
[7] Just one example should suffice. In the early 2000s, I resigned my Commission and relocated my family back to Germany (because the German social welfare system of that era was incomparably superior to anything available in the States). We enrolled Anna in a Geistigbeginderteschule (“School for the Profoundly Disabled”).
One day, I went to the school to inform the Schulleiterin (“Girl Principal”) that I was pulling Anna out for a few weeks to attend a special therapy in Poland.
With great earnestness, as if explaining an obvious truth to one of her severely disabled charges, she said, Das Schulrechte sagt das ist nicht Dürfen. (“The school law states that this is not permitted.”)
Dann hättet ihr wohl härter kämpfen sollen, I replied. (“Then I guess you people should have fought harder.”)
[8] I was a U.S. Cavalryman, for goodness sakes, and even I am not crazy enough to wear my Stetson when tanking up in Sioux country.
[9] How’s the “New South Africa” working out, baby?
[10] Historians generally place Union military deaths (combat and disease) around 360,000, representing roughly 10% of the Northern fighting-age male population in 1860. This sacrifice stands as a historical anomaly: A civilization spilling its own blood to eradicate an institution that had been a globally accepted norm since the dawn of recorded history.
[11] The only significant point from which I diverged with General Patton is that his Granddaddy was a traitor who fought against the Union as a Confederate Cavalryman. But I certainly can’t hold that against the man who was the greatest master of the Pursuit in the Second War.
[12] My Mom’s great-great Granddaddy, Mathias Butsch, invited the monks from Engelberg (“Mt. Angel”), Switzerland to Mount Angel. Just before she passed away, my Mom – whose German Catholic forbears have been living stably in Mt. Angel for as long as my Dad’s Scots-Irish forbears have been rootless Warrior-Monks – said to me, “Bubba, I always knew your brothers would stay; and I always knew you would leave.” You can take a Warrior-Monk out of Mt. Angel; but, thank God, you can’t take Mt. Angel out of a Warrior-Monk.
[13] The weaponization of the Crucifixion to justify antisemitism is a horrific corruption of Scripture. Christ Himself, while being executed, petitioned for the absolution of His executioners: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Furthermore, the modern Western theological consensus (most famously articulated in the 1965 Catholic declaration Nostra Aetate, “Our Age”) explicitly repudiates the charge of collective Jewish deicide, aligning Church doctrine with historical truth and biblical reality: The judicial murder of Jesus Christ was a localized political act, not an eternal ethnic curse.
[14] The rejection of generational blood guilt is not a modern progressive invention; it is hard-coded into the foundational bedrock of Judeo-Christianity. The prophet Ezekiel explicitly dismantled the collectivist idea of inherited sin thousands of years before the New World was colonized (for the second time): “The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them” (Ezekiel 18:20).
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