Norma Loudenslayer of Citrus Heights, CA posted this letter to the editor in the Sacramento Bee.
And I quote:
“Japan owes America the apology, not the other way around.”
“I vividly remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thomas Lea Owsley from my hometown…went down on the USS Arizona.”
“I commend President Harry Truman for having the guts to end what Japan started.”
I also commend FDR for the internment camps for the Americans with Japanese heritage.”
“It is easy for survivors of the bomb to cast blame, but those who would consider that America apologize are not looking at the full picture….”
This is why even the Japanese Americans lost their lives in war, to help preserve our Democracy so we can all express our views, conflicting or otherwise. And here are mine:
Under the rising sun,
The enemy came,
Wearing my face.
from my Kapoho: Memoirs of a Modern Pompeii
After Pearl Harbor, we too lost something, we lost our identity along with our dignity and honor. My ancestors, too, are buried, buried in Hiroshima.
Masahiro Sasaki, survivor and brother of Sadako of the thousand cranes story, in his addresses before UN and in America faced a child who asked him, “Mr. Sasaki, which country dropped the atomic bomb?’
Mr. Sasaki answered, “ It’s been more than sixty years since the bombs were dropped… So, I forgot who dropped the bomb.”
The adults looked puzzled but the child understood his response . Looking at the boy, he said, “Children! Teach your parents!”
The survivors asked not to be called victims. As Mr. Sasaki explained, “To say ‘victim’ requires a victimizer, and the victimizer is led to blame; and that starts the cycle of blame. For example,if we say ‘victim of Hiroshima,’ the next sentence that comes up will involve Pearl Harbor and the blaming chain gets stuck all the way in the past. Then we are completely derailed from the lesson that war itself is humanity’s Pandora, and that nuclear weapons are something that came out of Pandora’s Box.”
(The above quotations are lifted from To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino)
How long do we wait to get ourselves unstuck from blame and political discourse before we’re able to use our knowledge and experiences to create a nuclear free world of peace? We don’t need any apology or blame to help create this world.We owe this to our children.
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Frances Kakugawa's Blog 