9/20/23

 Wednesday, September 20, 2023

In bed at 9"40, up at 6:30, 60°, high of 74°, cloudy day, AQI=31, wind S at 11 mph, 5-12/20. 0.15" of rain in last 24 hours,  Sunrise at 6:36 at 88°, sunset at 6:;53 °, 12+16.

LTMW a little after 6:30, I see good neighbor John McGregor out walking Dorothy.  The lawn service folks are here shortly after 7 and the chickadees arrive for some breakfast about the same time.  I need to fill the sunflower/safflower tube.

2 VA appointments this morning and wondering why I made them.  . . .  Then at about 7:15, the PT nurse called to say the therapist is home sick today and rescheduled me to the 29th on 1 p.m.  

Casting Blossoms to the Sky is a 2 and 40 minutes 2012 film  written, directed, and edited by Nobuhiko Obayashi which I've been watching on OVID.     Obayahsi was born in Onomichi in Hiroshima province in 1938 and survived his childhood during the war.  Onomichi is 83 miles from Iwakuni where I was briefly stationed 20 years after the war, before I flew to Vietnam on w C130 Hercules cargo plane.  The story is set in Nagaoka, a city on Honshu that was reduced to ash and rubble by a raid by 125 B-29s dropping 163,00 incendiary cluster bombs weighing 925 tons in a raid on August 1, 1945 lasting an hour and forty minute, killing 1,486 residents including 280 school age children.  The Americans suffered no casualities.  Since 2003, a fireworks display is held every August 1st at 10:30 p.m. to commemorate the bombing.  One of the minor characters in the film is an 87 year old woman who survived the firebombing and says:  "The fireworks remind me of the bombs,  That's why I cant enjoy them from the bottom of my heart.  War terrorizes so many more people than the ones who die on the battlefields or in air raids."   I was struck by her statement not because I ever endured anything like what the victims of the firebombing suffered, but because I have a similar dislike for firework displays, knowing they simulate exploding weapons of death; they remind me of Hell Night at Quantico's Officers' Basic School.  Later in the film, this character says 'fireworks are light and sound, just like war.'  In any event, by the end of the film the fireworks come to have a deep emotional and spiritual significance to the people of Nagaoka, representing 'the souls of the faithful dearly departed' as we used to pray in Catholic services.

The lead character in the film is the reporter Reiko Endo, a young woman born in Nagasaki.  At the end of the film she says to her friend, the local taxi driver "There are so many things we have to do over.  I'm returning to Nagasaki.  And I've decided to become a mother.  I feel brave.  Of course, my baby will need a father first.  But first, I'll go to the disaster areas of east Japan.  Nanaoka, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini Atoll and Fukushima.  The connection between Japan's towns and me . . . the U.S., the world, yesterday, today, and tomorrow . . . I want to think about everything that connects into my life.   Mr. Akiyoshi Muraoka, be friendly to others."  The end of the film is beautifully filmed and profoundly hopeful, hopeful of a world without war and without nuclear weapons, a world with peaceful relations between the two former bitter enemies, the U.S. and Japan, and throughout the world.  

A striking image that Obayashi employs throughout the film is that of sailor-suited schoolgirls and others on unicycles darting about the city's residents, especially one such girl who looks into the camera after various survivors of the bombing describe various horrors and says "I know him (or her or them)"  Was she meant to represent the dead child, Hana, of the 87 year old woman whose daughter died on her back in the river, or did she symbolize the youth of the world, or what?  And what was with the unicylcles all over?  I'm not astute enough to catch on to symbols like this.  As I watched the film, I thought to myself that I should re-watch it to see if it becomes clearer to me on a second viewing, but at almost 3 hours long, I suppose it's unlikely that I will.

One thing that was very clear to me, however, was the horror and terror of Curtis LeMay's and Harry Truman's firebombing of Japanese cities even on virtually the eve of dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, knowing that the Japanese would surely surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Could the purpose of firebombing Nagaoka on August 1, 1945 been anything other than vengeance on the Japanese civilians who were killed?  We oughtn't to forget that Curtis LeMay remarked that if the U.S. were to lose the war against Japan, he and others would be tried for war crimes for the deliberate targeting of Japanese civilian targets.  It's something to think about as we all nod our heads in agreement that Putin and his myrmidons should be tried for their targeting civilian targets in Ukraine.  From Chapter XIX of my memoir:

I found this letter from Winston Churchill ["It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be revised."]  while doing some research on strategic bombing.  It is notable for its bald acknowledgment that a prime purpose of strategic bombing of cities was “increasing the terror, though under other pretexts” and for its reluctant abjuring of “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.”  The German military of course were past masters of Schrecklichkeit or terrorism at least from the inception of World War I and its invasion of Belgium, the bombardment of historic Louvain and torching of its priceless university library.  However, it did not take long for the British and Americans to get into their own brand of in terrorem tactics on civilians, especially the firebombing of cities in Europe and Japan, including the precious medieval city of Dresden which Churchill mentions as a “query against the conduct of Allied bombing.”  The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented the pinnacle of terror bombing.  

A survivor of the death and destruction visited on Japan by the United States after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Obayashi was a pacifist, a critic of militarism in Japan and elsewhere.  In one scene, the old lady who hates fireworks is seen hiding in a crude bomb shelter with her father on the night of the firebombing.  He urges her to look up at the B-29s and the falling napalm bombs and says "See what human beings are capable of."  Not just Americans, but 'human beings,' as observed by Solzhinitzen and his comment about the line between good and evil running through every human heart.  Another character says to her daughter "War takes away people's dreams."  Obayashi refers to Japan's conscription of Korean women as "comfort women" for Japanese soldiers with a character saying "In war, people both cause and incur harm."

Re: Nagasaki, one survivor who speaks in the film is a Japanese Catholic priest from the Catholic community in Nagasaki, one of long-standing.  The "Fat Man" plutonium bomb did most of its damage on that Catholic community. killing 8,500 of Nagasaki's 12,000 Catholics.  Ground zero was almost a direct hit on the Catholic cathedral, significantly north of the city's commercial center and the Mitsubishi shipyard which would be the 'natural targets,' leading some to argue that the attack was intended to destroy Japan's largest Catholic community, where 95 % of the country's Catholics lived.