abombed Madonna in Nagasaki, but I feel...

Nagasaki had the Atomic bomb on August 9th 60 years ago. The Urakami Church will put on public display the head of the bombed Virgin Mary. Her blackened eyes tell something strongly to us. Here is the site about a Madonna. I will visit Nagasaki in September, and I will go to the Urakami Church.

To be honest with you, it is difficult writing about the war for me. I cannot explain this feeling well...
I feel I don't know enough, don't know enough of the truth of WW2. When I talk about war, it means WW2, but for the U.S (and Iraq people maybe ) it may be the Iraq war which their family and friends die in just right now. I am the person who don't know WW2, who hasn't experienced a war, who hasn't lost family, I am so so far from war.

I am hoping for peace. I may say war is evil, it is my honest feeling, but how does it feel for people who have the war right now?... I won't hesitate to say that, but I wonder my words would sound like peace-addict's baloney. That feeling is getting stronger every year.... But still I posted and will post a bomb topic every summer because it may be the job of Japanese as the only country that has experienced nuclear bombings.

When a war happen, first victim is the truth, someone said that.
I feel I need to face up to the truth of World War 2, about the U.S., about Germany, Italy, UK other all European countries, about China, Korea other all Asian countries, and of course about Japan and ahat was happened in the world, then I want to talk with others without hiding the truth, sorry what must sorry, without punishing others, without having a sense of victimization, without clouding my decision because of excessive nationalism.

I feel a dilemma, I could not break out of the dilemma this season every summer.

Comments

[mehyar]

Mari-san, Greetings

thanks for a wonderful and informative web site.

i visited Hiroshima a few years ago and was overwhelmed by what i saw at the Peace Park Museum.

i think people who wage war are not truly free.

best,

mehyar

olivenhain, california

[Mari]

Hi There
Thank you for all comments. I was unsure I wrote about Madonna. It was really hard. As a Japanese we should say "no more hiroshima, no more nagasaki", yes I think so. But our words can reach to other people in this way? Most Japanese don't know enough about them now, actually anti-abombed American people would know more. I feel uneasy.

It is hard I know. But I should, I will be suspecious what I learned at school, watched on TV, read on Books. I shoud know other side of story more.

[Candace]

I appreciate your subtle thoughts. I feel similarly. I'd be surprised and disgusted if any sane person reveled in the idea of war, but I think it's often too simplistic to talk about war and peace as black and white without discussing the thousands, maybe millions of factors that precipitate and change the outcome of it. Otherwise, we don't really have a way to prevent it from happening again.

Thank you for your post.

[brenda]

Mari,

As an American living now in Tokyo, I have also wondered about how to go about talking about the war with people here. So much shame exists on both sides, and although WWII happened long before I was born, I still feel as though in some ways, many of us are still fighting the war. I don't know--and want to know--how many Japanese people feel about the past, about the conflict of WWII, about the lingering feelings of sadness and resentment. I wonder how it is that we all can begin to move past these feelings, and I know that this will not happen unless we can forgive.

This is a good and necessary entry, Mari. Thank you for expressing so well the confusion and sadness that so many of us feel when we think about war.

Yours,
Brenda

[faBu]

"Mechanized civilization has just reached its highest degree of savagery. There is a certain indecency in celebrating a discovery which above all serves the greatest rage for destruction man has known for centuries" - Albert Camus - August 8th 1945

[shiro]

we as a race are so willing to throw our lives away over concepts like "race" and "country"... actually nowadays people are so willing to throw their lives away over "the next hit", "the gang i run with", or "the look i want"...

i wonder when will we be able to transcend these petty concerns and realise that we are all the same, we are all human beings.

and that life is a gift, and as with all gifts, is something to be cherished, and used to its fullest potential.

maybe mari, you wouldn't have to be writing about feeling bad about war when that happens.

i hope that happens... soon. and if that sounds like "peace-addicted baloney", so be it then.

[dan]

you tell a war is evil. it sounds right, and it sounds sensible. i'm an american, the government here is waging war in iraq. i know people who are there now. i don't want them to be there.

your words don't sound like peace-addicted baloney.

i think anyone who would call it "peace-addicted baloney" is a dangerous person.

if the U.S. had lost the war the administrators and leaders would have been prosecuted as war criminals for what they did in Japan. i think colonel curtis lemay himself said this. i don't think he was a good man, and i don't think he even regretted anything, but he was right when he said that.

city to city firebombings killed hundreds of thousands of people. before the atomic bombs were even dropped.

war is a sick thing. maybe this is even a sick planet.

people still say "japan deserved it." it makes no sense. japan did horrible things, like every other country who makes war. but war never brings justice, it just kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of innocent people. Dresden, Germany was entirely burned to the ground too. for nothing. some people will still say "Germany deserved it." but "japan" "germany" and "america" are simplified, abstract entities. it's actual individual people and families who get killed in the bloodshed and bloodlust, and the flames. and they never attacked or invaded anybody, but their "country" did.

maybe you are conflicted because you have strong feelings about atrocities in japan, but you don't want to ignore the japanese military's own crimes. in manchuria, or on unmarked POW hellships (my great grandfather died on one), or some other awful thing that every country was doing so there's no reason young people today should feel personally guilty.

in every direction wars leave us with no shortage of things to come to terms with and forgive, really no shortage of examples of what's wrong with cyclical violence, even 50 years later. and at the time it leaves no shortage of human death and misery.

i've never had to dig dead bodies out of a flattened smoking wasteland that used to be a city. lots of people around the world have had to do that.

you tell a war is evil: that's your honest feeling.

maybe 4 of the 19 hijackers were iraqi. iraq itself as a nation had no capability to threaten anybody anywhere-- none of its neighbors and nobody else in the world saw it as a threat. now thousands of other iraqis die, innocent. i don't think they wanted war or destruction, or invaders. and in new york city, most people opposed the iraq war, even after the world trade center was destroyed. it's a crooked war, and american soldiers and iraqi people are dying for it.

the madonna still exists. the human beings who experienced the same thing, if they could talk, what would they say about peace and war?

you don't sound like you're talking peace-addicted baloney. anyone who calls it "peace-addicted baloney" probably just want to kill people. they believe in killing thousands of people to Make Things Right. they try to justify it. it's extremism and hysteria.

a prominent nazi described very explicitly: it's hard work to get normal people to support a war, or to fight it. it's hard to get them to do it. you have to fill them with fear or hatred, fear or hatred of some "vile despicable" "enemy" because no normal person wants to stop living their normal life and go die or go kill people.

this is historical american hysteria and warmongering (the images here are extremely racist and noxious): http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/students/propaganda/poster1.html

people don't make images like that, or think they're sensible unless they're diseased, hysterical, fearful, hateful.

here's a general outline of ww2 in very plain terms, from wikipedia. the outline is common knowledge, but the language is so stark.

"World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: immense human suffering, fierce indoctrinations, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons like the atom bomb.

Almost 60 million people died as a result of the war, including acts of genocide such as the Holocaust and General Ishii Shiro's Unit 731 experiments in Pingfan. Few areas of the world were unaffected, the war involved the "home front" and bombing of civilians to a new degree."

and the modern warfare didn't get left behind in the past. we still have it. it was the same story through the entire 20th century, and still today, just not on a massive global scale.

that's what we'll have again if peace is baloney.

[Martin]

Yes, you decribe it really well, the dilemma of war. Recently I was reading Mainichi Shimbun, every day they show the front page of their 1945 newspaper, what they wrote 60 years ago. We cannot understand all the details of such horror. http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20050809p2a00m0na033000c.html

Such amazing ignorance...

[Gwen]

When wars happen, the FIRST victim is CHILDREN! :(

[Lumpy]

That image says alot about the horrors of war. An erie image... an erie anniversary...

I agree with your first commenter, yous houdl say more.

[dan]

you should say more. it's important.

war is a terrible thing. that's the truth.

i don't like the idea of firebombs or atomic weapons destroying people.

the atomic bombings were and are shameful and sickening on a massive scale, like practically everything else that happened during world war2. and iraq now and too many other places in the world.

war buries the truth. when one of the early godzilla movies came out in america, a scene where people were being burned alive in buildings got edited out. deleted. because the images resembled nuclear holocaust. america couldn't face the truth of what it had done. --nations can't let themselves look in the mirror. and all the military film footage from hiroshima and nagaski was kept secret from the world after the bombings. all the film got locked away, Top Secret. americans never saw any of it until the 1970s, and only part of it. nations hide the truth of their sins. and in war they hide the truth of the humanity of the "enemy". they have to turn the enemy into animals, vermin, vile creatures. in propaganda campaigns.

it's important for people to talk about it, and to talk about clouds of nationalism. and the destruction that comes.