Father Bill Bichsel’s Journey of Repentance – an anti-war event in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – appears to be making a big splash in Japan.

A big enough splash that it brought the New York bureau chief of The Asahi Shimbun – Japan’s equivalent of the New York Times – to Tacoma yesterday to interview a supporter and an opponent of the event. Me as well.

Yamanaka Toshihiro, a lanky, soft-spoken man, wanted to talk about an editorial I’d written about the angry local reactions to the “journey” (which I uncharitably described as “moral preening”). The editorial neither defended nor attacked the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki all those years ago; I was attempting to place those bombings in the larger context of a war in which the mass killing of civilians became a deliberate strategy on both sides.

World War II – which left as many as 70 million people dead – was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity, at least in the space of so few years. (The smallpox vaccine might argue to the contrary, but it had centuries on its side.)

Yamanaka wanted to know why so many of our letter writers were upset about the Journey of Repentance. He said Bichsel and company would be received as celebrities in Japan, “like Michael Jackson.”

Obviously, Americans and Japanese are going to have different takes on World War II, especially on the atomic bombings. The Japanese see the latter – quite accurately – as an unspeakable horror in which vast numbers of their countrymen (and women and children) were burned alive. Most Americans to this day tend to see the A-bomb as a brutal necessity that ultimately saved more lives than it destroyed by bringing the war to a quick end.

Still, many Americans have made gestures of sympathy to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in years past without stirring up the kind of reaction we saw this time.

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This editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition.

Comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through ...

So said the president who brought Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley to the Rose Garden Thursday for the much-lampooned “suds summit.”

But Barack Obama didn’t utter those words last week. He uttered them as a presidential candidate almost a year and a half ago while trying to extricate his campaign from inflammatory comments made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor.

This time, Obama was doing damage control for his own comment that the police “acted stupidly” July 16 in arresting Gates, a personal friend. Obama quickly swallowed those words, but the world had already seen an American president entangling himself in a front-porch dispute in Cambridge, Mass., that he admitted knowing little about.

It was, as Obama said, “a teachable moment” – for him, for Gates and Crowley, for the country.

White Americans can take one lesson away from this: A black American man can get an Ivy League education, become a constitutional law professor, a U.S. senator and finally president of the United States – and still cringe when he hears of a black friend arrested after an unfounded suspicion of burglary.

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Let’s make this clear: The News Tribune is endorsing incumbent Linda Bird for University Place City Council Position 1. We think she is by far the best candidate in the field of three on the Aug. 18 primary ballot.

But UPlace voters might think otherwise if they’ve seen the many campaign signs posted by one of her two opponents, Dan Carnrite. Big stickers across his signs read: “Carnrite better choice,” and he attributes the quote to The News Tribune.

He took the words “better choice” out of context and is implying that he is the TNT’s choice for the position. That is not the case.

In our July 24 endorsement editorial, “Keep Linda Bird on UPlace City Council,” we clearly stated that she is the best of the three candidates. But we recognize that some voters might want an alternative to the incumbent. We wrote: “For University Place voters who are intent on change in Position 1, Carnrite is the better choice due to his background in planning in Edgewood, Pacific and Tenino.”

We are disappointed to learn that a candidate we thought had promise took our words out of context. Voters should take that into consideration when they mark their ballots.

I don’t get this “czar” thing. When did it start? Can I blame it on Nixon? Carter? Maybe the Gipper’s “drug czar”? Or can we blame it on Bill Clinton for making Hillary the “health czar”? And poor Bill Bennett. He started out as a bona fide secretary of education, but by the time he got recycled into the second Bush administration, he too had to be a “czar.”

Folks, “czars” are from Russia. They are monarchists. Hereditary autocrats. Authoritarians.

This is America. This is a republic. We don’t have “czars” in America.

Well, yes we do . . .

It seems the Democrats are now outdoing the GOP in this “czar” business. Congressman Eric Cantor, R-Va., in a recent Washington Post article, listed a few of President Obama’s “czars”:

“The administration has a Mideast peace czar (not to be confused with the Mideast policy czar), a Sudan czar and a Guantanamo closure czar. Then there's the green jobs czar, sometimes in conflict with the energy czar, who talks to the technology czar, who sometimes crosses paths with the urban affairs czar.

"We mustn't forget the Great Lakes czar or the WMD czar, who no doubt works hand in hand with the terrorism czar. The stimulus accountability czar is going through a rough time right now, as is the TARP czar – but thankfully they have to answer to the government performance czar. And seemingly everyone falls under the auspices of the information czar. In a government full of duplicative bureaucracies, adding more layers with overlapping responsibilities hardly seems the way to go.”

To be sure, Cantor exaggerates a wee bit. But the above quote doesn’t even include Obama’s famed “car czar” (who, BTW, recently quit; I can hear Michelle saying, “Barry, you gotta appoint a new car czar pronto!”)

OK, OK, I’m almost through with the “Czar” rant. But let me end emphatically: In America, we don’t want no steenking “czars”! Hey, all you “czars” out there: Get real jobs!