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Using Shared History to Heal the Wounds of World War II
25 Years of Re-connecting the Monterey Bay Region and Minamiboso Japan.
Traveling with a Purpose

An Illustrated Lecture Presentation
By Sandy Lydon

Award Winning Historian and author of The Japanese in the Monterey Bay Region: A Brief History
4:00 – 6:00 PM
(Including overview of new Japan 2020 itinerary)

For New Japan 2020 go to HERE

Room 435, Cabrillo College
6500 Soquel Drive, Aptos, CA 95003
(Room 435 is in the 400 building on the upper campus)

To reserve a seat or seats, go to HERE

Transpacific Traveler:

For the past 25 years, I have been taking groups of Americans to Japan and leading Japanese groups here in California, using our shared history to reconnect the two shores that were intricately bound together in 1900.

In this process combined with teaching US History in one form another for almost 60 years in California, I’ve learned that neither side has a monopoly on Sam Cooke’s refrain:

“Don’t know much about history…” Sam Cooke, lyric from it’s a Wonderful life

Example: The Stories of Two Tunnels

There’s something fascinating and mysterious about tunnels. Nothing spews forth more historical nonsense than a recently-discovered tunnel.

The Myth of the Summit Tunnel and the Japanese – Hundreds of Chinese railroad workers drilled two tunnels, each over a mile long, through the Santa Cruz Mountains in the late 1870s. Dozens were burned to death in explosion in the doing. The Southern Pacific Railroad abandoned the through-the-mountain railroad line in 1940

On – date – US Army demolition teams, at the request of Southern Pacific – used high-explosives to collapse the ends of the Summit Tunnel. The e explosion was so enormous that it registered on the seismograph at blank. Everybody heard it. And the rumors began to fly – Japanese soldiers were found hiding in the tunnels, etc. The one that stuck was that the Army blew up the tunnels to PREVENT Japanese soldiers from hiding there. I heard that rumor over and over. It wasn’t true, of course, and in my Hooey History section, you can find the whole story and some stuff about submarines too: Link.

The Akayama Tunnel – Minamiboso, Japan.

In 1995, I was meeting with some local Japanese historians and they asked if I want to see some tunnels that had just recently been opened to the public near Tateyama. They took me to a tunnel portal on a hillside and told me that the tunnel complex had been swept by American occupation forces in 1945, taken over not long afterward by a mushroom farmer who wangled a lifetime lease from the Japanese government to use them to grow mushrooms. He lived a very long time and forty years after the first GI’s walked through the tunnels to ensure that there were no weapons or troops there, I walked into them.

After we walked through the remarkable complex, they asked me if I thought these tunnels would be of any interest to foreign visitors. “Are you KIDDING?” These are priceless I told them, and over the past 25 years, local Japanese historians have put together their history and an NGO now leads tours there. The tunnels were dug beneath the citizens and later residents had no idea.

So many stories

We always include at least one of the atomic bomb sites in our trips because I’ve learned that generations of high school debates have compressed the story of the bombs and the decision to use them into an ill-informed binary choice.

And when Americans hear the word “nuclear” bandied about at least once a day, it is essential that I can get a group to either Hiroshima or Nagasaki while we’re in Japan.

Around 5:30 we’ll shift gears and illuminate our upcoming trip in April 2020. We have a few spaces available, and we’ll answer questions.

If you want to see the newly-configured trip, go to Japan 2020 page.

To reserve a seat or seats, go HERE

If you plan to attend the Preview on Dec. 1, you can reserve a space for the evening by going HERE