Tough Topic...

Dear All,

To fully understand the Japanese psyche you must first understand where they have been historically and the place they want to hold in this world.

As England and the West celebrates VJ Day, Japan has its festival of the dead, Obon. And it's through no fault of their own that Obon falls when it does, it just happened that surrender happened when the spirits of the ancestors were believed to be returning.

I asked the vice principal of one of the elementary schools that I teach at about Obon today because I wanted to hear it from the perspective of someone not from my generation. Talking about it made her cry and in the process made me cry. I wonder, nay, realise that anything connected with World War II touches a nerve here. It's intense, it's difficult but I think it's important for me, as an alien in their world, from a military background, to understand how these people think and the strength of feeling here about that war and indeed about war in general.

On VJ day, we, the west, won everything; they, Japan, lost everything. We won freedom and the chance to live in a world free from contstraints or fears, we gained a sense of infallibility and power. Japan is acutely aware of its fallibility and of it's mistakes, misjudgements, past, whatever you want to call it and its reputation. The people here want to remedy that and restore their reputation in the world. It's a country that wants to forget but can't. We claim to not want to forget but do. It's a strange kind of opposite that I hope I will one day understand.

To my Chinese and Korean friends. You get angry because Japan does not teach the war and its atrocities and stuff that would rather be forgotten in its schools. I think now I see the reasons for it not teaching them. It hurts, it hurts like nothing I can imagine. It brought a grown woman, who is incredibly professional and composed usually, to tears in the staff room. I wouldn't want to teach it either. As we all know too well, I cry like a baby when I think about the reasons for certain events that occurred in said war, right now my essay about the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I wrote for Pols 308 last year is all too fresh in my mind and the tears I shed writing that thing may come down on my polka dot skirt at anytime, its haunting me big time today!

I feel like God, the universe, fate, whatever you might call it, has a plan for me in this country (being Japan if you didn't already work it out) and it's causing me to feel, really feel, the Western impact on this beautiful place.... and I'm not entirely sure that I like it. The Japanese are such a lovely people and I really hope that certain elements of the Western psyche don't find their way in.

Let us not forget what went on 63 years ago this month. Let's never let it happen again either.
The day we let it happen again is that day that humanity puts itself to shame.

I never want to forget what I learned this morning. I never want to lose hope in humanity and I sure as heck don't want to not learn while I am here.

The day I cease to learn from the people who have gone before me is the day I die.

I pray that these people continue to educate me about themselves and about the world at large.

I hope all are good back home and around the world and that somehow some way something that I've just said sinks in because it's moments like that of this morning that are why I came to Japan in the first place.

Peace, Love and Penguins!
~Rae