THIS is the season of war anniversaries, and these engender the best in humankind, and remind us that that which we once thought perduring, and bled and died for, winces away from moral inflexibility under the tides of history.
In Japan they are having a complicated time centering on Saipan. This island now belongs to us, and we paid dearly for it. Sixty-one years ago, from June 15 to July 9, 1944, our men fought to take the island, as the first step in wresting the Marianas away from Japan. The Japanese defenders resisted desperately, but the Americans finally prevailed. The island remains U.S. property, and there are no irredentist demands being made by the Japanese, even though they owned it throughout their empire days, from 1914 until we took it from them in 1944.
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