HONOLULU -- August stirs memories of the darkest hours in the complicated 150-year history of America's relations with Japan.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and on Aug. 9 the second on Nagasaki. About 200,000 Japanese perished in that holocaust.
On Aug. 15, Emperor Showa announced that, in an acute understatement, "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage."