Rhode Island is the only state in the United States that celebrates a holiday to commemorate the victory over Japan in World War II. Now there is a heated debate about the holiday.

Victory Day, the second Monday in August, commemorates the estimated 92,000 Rhode Islanders who served in the war and the more than 2,200 of them who were killed. Rhode Island first adopted the holiday in 1948. Arkansas adopted Victory Day as a state holiday in 1949, but abandoned it in 1975, opting instead to give state employees a day off on their birthdays.

Democratic Rhode Island Rep. Jennifer Stewart introduced a bill this year to change Victory Day to a day of peace and remembrance. She is accused of dishonoring World War II veterans. “I think it is an atrocity to take away the honor and bravery that these men and women deserve,” Rep. Patricia Morgan said at a State House hearing. “What they did was honorable and nothing that should be criticized.”

Stewart counters that she wants to honor the sacrifices of the past while creating a more peaceful future. The holiday’s association with the victory over Japan “refutes the hard truth that military victories are often based on civilian injuries and deaths,” Stewart says.

As a native Rhode Islander, I have experienced both sides of the debate.

I came of age marching in VJ Day parades in downtown Providence with my father, a World War II veteran who rose to the rank of major after four years of service in the China-India-Burma war zone. Every August he wore his military uniform, I wore my Boy Scout khakis. The atomic bombs the United States used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant my father would not have to be called into further combat. It meant we had won against the Japanese aggressors who had planned the murderous attack on Pearl Harbor. As I marched beside my father on Victory Day, I was convinced that the Japanese had gotten what they deserved.

But as an adult and a newspaper editor, my opinion changed: I met Sakue Shimohira, who was an 8-year-old girl when the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki and who suffered from radiation sickness even as an adult.

“I remember the houses all being blown to pieces,” she said at a lecture in Providence. “The river had run out of water and there were many bodies. I found my oldest sister dead under the rubble. My mother was missing. I found her later that day. I recognized her body by her gold tooth. I touched her body and it turned to ash.”

After I covered her speech, she asked me to send her a copy. A month later, she wrote to me, urging me to apply for a journalism fellowship, a ten-week stay in Japan to interview survivors like her, known in Japan as “hibakusha.” The fellowship was sponsored by the Hiroshima area daily newspaper, Chugoku Shimbun, and named Akiba Project after Tad Akiba, a Tufts University professor who was later elected mayor of Hiroshima.

I was selected for the fellowship. One of the members of the selection committee was the author John Hersey, whose travelogue to Hiroshima appeared in the New Yorker in 1946. He told me that his life had changed forever when he interviewed the survivors. He said I could expect the same.

Hersey was right. The testimonies I heard during my ten weeks in Japan still haunt me, especially each year as Victory Day approaches. Even if I believed that Japan’s leaders caused the carnage and hellfire that claimed Japanese civilians, how could I ever come to terms with the radiation sickness that plagued people like Sakue Shimohira for the rest of their lives?

But it’s not just what the survivors told me they experienced that continues to disturb me. It’s the fact that nuclear weapons still exist – and rogue states like Iran and North Korea are developing more and more of them. As Tad Akiba argues, the only way to prevent a nuclear attack is “the total elimination of nuclear weapons.”

That’s the awareness Stewart hopes to promote by renaming Victory Day. Her bill failed in the 2024 legislative session, but she says she will continue to push the bill if she’s re-elected in the fall.

“I plan to play the long game. Rhode Island is a forward-thinking state. We changed the name of our state four years ago,” she told me, referring to the 2020 referendum in which Rhode Islanders voted to remove “and Providence Plantations” from the state’s name.

“With VJ Day, we can do that again. What happens here can impact our nation. Given the positive response I’ve received, I believe we will succeed.”

Robert Israel is a Boston-based writer and contributor to Harvard University’s Divinity School Bulletin. He can be reached at [email protected].