On the eve of the 81st anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the annual Blackened Canteen ceremony was held Tuesday at the USS Arizona Memorial for the first time since the 2019 commemoration of the Dec. 7, 1941, invasion.

The ceremony, in which American and Japanese officials pour whiskey from a battle-damaged World War II canteen into the harbor as a peace offering, has been held on Oahu for three decades. But the tradition goes back much further.

It began in Japan in the aftermath of World War II as both Japanese and Americans grappled with the human cost of history’s bloodiest conflict. Today the U.S. and Japan maintain a strong alliance, but geopolitical tensions have once again gripped the Pacific amid competition with China and a historic year of missile tests by North Korea.

“This message is as relevant today as it was back in 1945-46,” retired Air Force Gen. Raymond Johns Jr. told attendees at the small ceremony. “I would say as I listen to the talk that I hear across the globe — the negativism, the disrespect that people are showing to each other — I think this ceremony, what it represents … is a gift to humanity and is needed now more than ever before.”

The story begins on June 20, 1945, during a bombing raid over Shizuoka, Japan. American B-29s based in Guam were attacking the city. The raid killed more than 2,000 citizens of Shizuoka and 23 American service members when their B-29s collided in midair. Local business owner and farmer Fukumatsu Ito was at the scene of the crash and attempted to pull survivors to safety, but all were fatally injured. He also retrieved the canteen, which belonged to one of the Americans.

Ito was a devout Buddhist who believed the young men’s deaths should be honored and bodies treated respectfully in spite of them having been enemies who rained destruction on his home.

“He did what he thought was right, to respect these airmen and bury them along with the 2,000 casualties in the community, with great criticism and actually retribution from the surrounding community,” Johns said. “And then he carried on every year in a small, quiet ceremony that remembered what happened.”

Eventually, Ito successfully got two monuments erected honoring both the Japanese and American dead and began hosting the ceremony on Mount Shizuhata. Before Ito’s death, he passed the canteen on to Dr. Hiroya Sugano, who was 12 years old when he lived through the bombing and saw the crash site. He took over the tradition from Ito in 1972 and began officially inviting Americans to participate.

In 1991 he attended the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. The following year, Sugano brought the Blackened Canteen to the anniversary and conducted the ceremony at the Arizona Memorial, and a new tradition was born. Sugano continues to hold the June 20 ceremony in Japan, but had returned every year to Pearl Harbor until the pandemic temporarily halted the tradition. He said that Pearl Harbor is the “most important place” to honor both American and Japanese war dead, because the war began here.

“It was a struggle to host the ceremony that would bring the closure and reconciliation for those veterans that fought in the Pacific war,” said Daniel Martinez, chief historian for the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument. “Not all veterans wanted it.”

However, Martinez said many veterans on both sides managed to find peace and even form friendships with their former enemies. But he said the memories of what happened are fading. He noted that when the ceremony began at Pearl Harbor, almost half of those in attendance were Pearl Harbor survivors. This year only two were in attendance.