Today I read quite a few interesting articles in the Saturday edition of the International Herald Tribute, the International version of the New York Times.
There was a striking article about requests by Japanese to the United States for an apology for dropping nuclear bombs on their country during World War II. The author was a Philipino author who was a witness to the suffering of his countrymen at the hands of the Japanese during that war. It took him some time to accept individual Japanese he encountered after the war, but, with time, he did befriend some Japanese people.
I think that the point he wished to make in the article was that there is more to the history of an event or a time than is apparent from what the popular media tells us. He didn’t want the suffering that he saw in Manila to be forgotten because of apparently greater suffering endured in Japan as the result of those awful weapons.
I’ve read a few other articles in the last few days or week that also touched on the importance of not forgetting people who have suffered or lived through some of the madness of the second world war. In The Oregonian, Ronaldo (Polo) Catalani wrote a beautiful article describing a group of asian elders who meet periodically in Portland for a meal and socializing. These people, Polo says, are giants in our midst, having lived long lives and lived through the turmoil of the twentieth century. Then, on NPR this past week, I heard an interview with Naomi Hirahara, a Japanese woman whose father was a Hiroshima survivor. As his daughter, she felt compelled to write fiction about a Japanese American (private eye, I think) who also happened to be a Hiroshima survivor. It was her way to pay deep respect to her father, who she considers a hero given that he was considered a lowly immigrant from a despised nation after World War II. In L.A., as many of his countrymen who also emigrated to the United States after the war, worked as laborers tending gardens and landscapes, regardless of the fact that he was an educated man in his home country. His daughter, as most children do, took for granted what her father did, not realizing the heroic effort it took for him to overcome the prejudice and difficult life in order to raise a family.
All of these pieces of literature illustrate for me how important the personal story is. There is the steady march of events of historical note that will forever be written down in textbooks and told through documentaries and remembered at memorials. But it is the personal story that will always hold more value to any one person, because of it being their connection with the past. In my own case, my father didn’t serve in the war because of his eyesight. It was a terrible blow to him as he saw all of his hometown friends go to war. Even though he didn’t fight, I find a sense of pride in his courage to want to go to war, to the extent that he wrote a letter to the Secretary of War pleading his case. It was with good humor that he used to tell us kids that the inch-long scar on his neck came from hand-to-hand battle with a Japanese soldier in war, not from a piece of glass in the street or yard near his first home in East Boston. Dad had purchased a several volume history of World War II, greatly illustrated and nicely bound, which he kept in a bookshelf in our living room. It provided a lot of entertainment and education for me as a child, reading about and seeing pictures of the heroism of that time.