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Happy Peace Day!
Aug. 6th, 2004 08:15 amHappy Peace Day!
I feel sort of depressed; today always depresses me. It depresses me even more that I don't feel as deeply as I did last year. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 1) at 8:15 in the morning (the time of the bombing) I had already been awake three hours due to jet lag and 2) I had only been in Hiroshima a week ago.
So . . . it was about a year and a week ago I walked through the city for the first time, just to get ice cream with our group because it was so insanely hot. The hotel smelled kind of mildewy, and our room was small, but we had a great balcony. We go over a bridge, just a random bridge, a bunch of us talking about how fast we can type, of all things, and then BAM-- there's the Sadako memorial. Which, seeing as how the first I knew of Hiroshima was after reading that book about her, was pretty special. Later I went back and left nine paper cranes there-- ironic, as I was nine when I read the book. The nine was perfectly on accident. In Japanese, it's also synonymous with pain. Hmm . . .
The more we walked around the city-- though I noticed it right off-- the more I felt the radiation, or the death, or whatever it was. The ground just leaked this energy. It sort of stopped my heart. I felt constantly afraid. It was sort of silly-- why would one be AFRAID by something that had happened 58 years ago (now 59)? You would expect just depression and remorse. I had that trippy dream that night, when I wasn't being woken up by my friend's sickly cough (great, in the city that reminds me of death, just wake up coughing in the middle of the night), about Bush being a moron and dropping bombs on things.
The next day, at the museum, I kept playing "My Last Breath" in my head, over and over, which was fitting and sort of chilling . . . I had just gotten the CD (yes, in Japan ^_^), so it was stuck in my head. Yet it was that song that played. Hmm . . .
Then there was that mutant spider . . . and Michael and Waldo and Jesus upstairs ran down and were all like, "AHHH! HUGE SPIDER IN OUR ROOM!" and the Japanese innkeeper just laughs at them and goes upstairs, but apparently when he got there, his eyes got huge at the sight of the spider, and he threw his shoe at it. Its BODY was the size of a drinking bottle cap; its legs were like a double handspan. There are supposed to be no spiders that big in Japan. We all figure it was a mutant . . . creepy . . .
Anyway . . . *sigh* it's really too bad I'm not in a ranty mood at the moment. Last year I spent the day arguing in a Hiroshima chatroom, and everybody kept trying to convert me to think the bombings were necessary, and I kept ranting (as if I was going to change my mind after being there!).
Yeah, yeah, I know Pearl Harbor had a lot of deaths, too, and the Japanese were absolutely shitty to our soldiers and their captured peoples, but, you know what? Japanese soliders weren't the ones killed in the bombings. It was wives, children, elderly-- Korean POWs that were working the industrial city. You can say that they were all hellbent on our destruction, even the children. Yeah, because they were desperate and a people in wartime. There was no food, there were hardly any supplies, and children weren't ALLOWED to just NOT help out. You went to work, not school. Besides, look at some of the kids in our nation, now-- or in Iraq, or in Israel and Palestine. It's very easy to get innocent minds hellbent on another nation's destruction.
At least the Japanese gave us the courtesy of never killing our civilians. It's more than can be said for us.
God, I abhor civilian warfare.
If somebody killed me in the name of my country under the impression that I was siding with Bush, etc, etc . . . I would be one thoroughly pissed-off ghost.
Hmm, well I ended up with a little rant there.
Oii I miss Japan . . . it makes me want to cry.
I feel sort of depressed; today always depresses me. It depresses me even more that I don't feel as deeply as I did last year. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 1) at 8:15 in the morning (the time of the bombing) I had already been awake three hours due to jet lag and 2) I had only been in Hiroshima a week ago.
So . . . it was about a year and a week ago I walked through the city for the first time, just to get ice cream with our group because it was so insanely hot. The hotel smelled kind of mildewy, and our room was small, but we had a great balcony. We go over a bridge, just a random bridge, a bunch of us talking about how fast we can type, of all things, and then BAM-- there's the Sadako memorial. Which, seeing as how the first I knew of Hiroshima was after reading that book about her, was pretty special. Later I went back and left nine paper cranes there-- ironic, as I was nine when I read the book. The nine was perfectly on accident. In Japanese, it's also synonymous with pain. Hmm . . .
The more we walked around the city-- though I noticed it right off-- the more I felt the radiation, or the death, or whatever it was. The ground just leaked this energy. It sort of stopped my heart. I felt constantly afraid. It was sort of silly-- why would one be AFRAID by something that had happened 58 years ago (now 59)? You would expect just depression and remorse. I had that trippy dream that night, when I wasn't being woken up by my friend's sickly cough (great, in the city that reminds me of death, just wake up coughing in the middle of the night), about Bush being a moron and dropping bombs on things.
The next day, at the museum, I kept playing "My Last Breath" in my head, over and over, which was fitting and sort of chilling . . . I had just gotten the CD (yes, in Japan ^_^), so it was stuck in my head. Yet it was that song that played. Hmm . . .
Then there was that mutant spider . . . and Michael and Waldo and Jesus upstairs ran down and were all like, "AHHH! HUGE SPIDER IN OUR ROOM!" and the Japanese innkeeper just laughs at them and goes upstairs, but apparently when he got there, his eyes got huge at the sight of the spider, and he threw his shoe at it. Its BODY was the size of a drinking bottle cap; its legs were like a double handspan. There are supposed to be no spiders that big in Japan. We all figure it was a mutant . . . creepy . . .
Anyway . . . *sigh* it's really too bad I'm not in a ranty mood at the moment. Last year I spent the day arguing in a Hiroshima chatroom, and everybody kept trying to convert me to think the bombings were necessary, and I kept ranting (as if I was going to change my mind after being there!).
Yeah, yeah, I know Pearl Harbor had a lot of deaths, too, and the Japanese were absolutely shitty to our soldiers and their captured peoples, but, you know what? Japanese soliders weren't the ones killed in the bombings. It was wives, children, elderly-- Korean POWs that were working the industrial city. You can say that they were all hellbent on our destruction, even the children. Yeah, because they were desperate and a people in wartime. There was no food, there were hardly any supplies, and children weren't ALLOWED to just NOT help out. You went to work, not school. Besides, look at some of the kids in our nation, now-- or in Iraq, or in Israel and Palestine. It's very easy to get innocent minds hellbent on another nation's destruction.
At least the Japanese gave us the courtesy of never killing our civilians. It's more than can be said for us.
God, I abhor civilian warfare.
If somebody killed me in the name of my country under the impression that I was siding with Bush, etc, etc . . . I would be one thoroughly pissed-off ghost.
Hmm, well I ended up with a little rant there.
Oii I miss Japan . . . it makes me want to cry.
