While most Americans celebrated the country’s historic soccer win Sunday night, a vocal minority saw the opportunity to stir up a Twitter storm.
The resounding 5-2 victory by the U.S. Women's National Team over Japan prompted some people to suggest that the game was payback for the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
More than 2,400 people died in the surprise assault by Japan on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii.
Others on Twitter used America's third triumph at the Women's World Cup to make barbed comments about the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, in which at least 135,000 people died.
"Pearl Harbor" was among the most popular trending topics in the U.S. following the game, ranking alongside the team names "#USAvJPN" and the U.S. goalkeeper "Hope Solo."
The words "Pearl Harbor" typically get around 500 mentions per day, according to the analytics website Topsy. On Sunday this spiked to more than 50,000 mentions, although many of these were from people expressing outrage at the original joke.
