Kandinsky Paints Pearl Harbor

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Kandinsky painted Pearl Harbor because history had already decided where to hang the picture.

There were airplanes becoming red circles, battleships becoming black rectangles, explosions turning into yellow arguments with blue water. December 7 entered American memory looking almost abstract already.

My Japanese grandfather had another painting.

Decades later we talked about taking a vacation to Oahu. He said no.

He remembered Tokyo.

Not the Tokyo of postcards or little restaurants where somebody puts a perfect piece of fish on rice, but the Tokyo that burned. American bombers came at night carrying incendiaries, and whole neighborhoods became fire because Japanese houses had the unfortunate architectural habit of being made from things that burn.

He could not understand why we wanted to vacation beside Pearl Harbor.

Everybody talks about Pearl Harbor, he said.

Nobody talks about Tokyo.

I imagined Kandinsky standing between the two memories with his paintbrush, wondering what color historical justice was.

Pearl Harbor gets a date.

Tokyo gets smoke.

Pearl Harbor gets battleships and memorials and speeches. Tokyo gets an asterisk somewhere between Iwo Jima and Hiroshima, though the March 1945 firebombing killed roughly 100,000 people in a single night.

That is a lot of people to put inside an asterisk.

Maybe Kandinsky couldn’t paint Tokyo because there wouldn’t be enough canvas. The red circle would expand until it swallowed the geometry. Houses would become flames, flames would become people, people would become smoke, and smoke would become the enormous gray abstraction called what happened next.

History likes beginnings better than consequences.

Beginnings have dates.

Consequences have grandfathers.

My grandfather carried Tokyo quietly across decades until one afternoon somebody said Oahu, and suddenly the old city started burning again.

That was his Kandinsky.

Red over black.

Black over orange.

A little blue Pacific Ocean separating two countries, each remembering what had been done to it more clearly than what it had done to the other.

Perhaps that is why Kandinsky paints Pearl Harbor and doesn’t paint Tokyo.

We supply the missing canvas ourselves.

Sometimes it hangs inside a grandfather for fifty years before anybody notices it.