The center, which officially opened Dec. 7 and is drawing about 4,000 visitors a day, was built in part because the old one was sinking on reclaimed land. The park service had also outgrown the old facility.
The new center is on the same site but has expanded to cover several times the original area. A large, grassy field overlooks the harbor to the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits above the battleship that sank just off Ford Island at the height of the battle. Benches are placed along the field, outside the exhibit halls, and along open-air walkways between buildings - a design element to give people a chance to contemplate or decompress after absorbing what they've read, heard, and seen inside.
Planning for the exhibits began five years ago, when the park service brought in top historians to brainstorm what the displays should contain. The themes that emerged fit inside two halls, "Road to War" and "Attack." A courtyard is dedicated to Hawaiian history.
The result is a broader, more in-depth view of the Sunday morning attack nearly 70 years ago. The passage of time helped achieve the new vision. So did the efforts of Japanese pilots and American survivors to reach out to each other and overcome deeply ingrained bitterness.
Daniel Martinez, the park service's chief Pearl Harbor historian, said it wouldn't have been possible to include the Japanese viewpoint in any official examination of the attack when he first started working at the visitor center in the 1980s.
"It was just too recent and the wounds were still open," Martinez said. "The idea of exploration of history would have been found unsavory by some of the Pearl Harbor survivors who were still dealing with the wounds of that war."
