I’ll share this from my own family, with nothing to do with models of Axis aircraft.
My parents divorced when I was 7. My mom tried to make it work where we were at, in Houston, but ultimately we ended up moving to her home town (which I consider to be my home town even though I was only there from 5th grade through the end of high school). She had no job, very little money, so we ended up moving in with my grandparents. This was in 1977.
My grandfather was a Navy vet from WWII. He had served aboard a type of ship used as a floating dry dock. I would learn years later that he had survived one of those ships being sunk while he was aboard. The other part of his story was that he had returned to the States (this part I’m just guessing at, but perhaps my grandmother traveled somewhere to meet him) on two occasions. On the second of those trips, as the story was relayed to me, he was literally boarding a ship to return to the South Pacific when he received a telegram informing him of the birth of his second daughter, my aunt (my mom was born shortly before Pearl Harbor).
So in 1977, there was a show on TV called Baa Baa Black Sheep. For me, that was must watch TV. I knew more about WWII than most 10-year-olds, but it was only surface level knowledge. To me, the Japanese were the bad guys, the Americans the good guys. Very simplistic. My grandfather had a recliner that he sat in every evening after dinner while watching TV. He never spoke about anything he saw on TV. But when we would watch Baa Baa Black Sheep every week, I was aware of reactions from that recliner. His reactions were like someone exhaling more audibly than normal, but with some umph behind them. I always felt like he was angry when that show was on.
Flash forward 14 years. I had just graduated from Texas A&M and bought my first car, a Toyota. I no longer lived in our home town, but we were having a family get-together on a weekend so I went to be part of that. I parked my new Camry in my grandfather’s driveway. At some point, he observed that there was a Japanese car in his driveway - the A&M Former Student sticker on the back windshield made it obvious who it belonged to. We had a brief discussion where he told me to remove that “Japanese crap” from his property and to never park it there again. Obviously I honored his demand right away. After that, we had one of the best conversations we ever had. Our family heritage includes a lot of German. In that conversation, I asked him that had he been sent to Europe rather than the South Pacific, would he have harbored the same hatred of all things German and responded like this had I parked a new BMW in his driveway. He thought about that for a bit, then told me he thought he probably would have.
I 100% understand his hatred of the Japanese. Their actions on December 7 took him away from his young family, and I’m sure he saw a lot that stuck with him for the rest of his life that he would rather not have had to see. He passed in 2002 after a battle with Alzheimer’s. I miss him even after all these years, and still have a photo of him on a shelf here in my house.
As for your wife, I would simply not display the Zero.