8/9 1945

When I was 10 years old,
I went to Nagasaki's peace museum as a school trip.
At that time, I did not realize
but I was profoundly traumatized by that experience.
Ever since then, I have had a fear that
someday I will have a horrible death by the nuclear attack.
Especially after 9/11, that had become more real to me.

If you go to YouTube,
you can find many Hiroshima-Nagasaki related videos.
Then if you read the comments on those videos,
many of them are like either "Japs deserved those" or
"Nuclear attacks on Japan were totally justifiable".

If you visit the peace museum of Hiroshima or Nagasaki
just once,
You realize those could not be justifiable no matter what.

We all remember how much we were horrified
by the images of 9/11 that we saw on TV.
But being compared with
what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
9/11 was rather the much smaller incident.
Just think about it,
at that time, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the entire cities had become like 9/11.
Those were clearly beyond our imagination.

From my writing career, I have learned a few.
And two things people hate to know about
no matter how true they are are
something makes them feel guilty
and something can destroy their fantasies.
Many Americans do not want to believe U.S. could do
such a horrible things to other people
for unjustifiable reasons.
For them, America has to be always right.
Well then, of course,
Japanese schools even do not teach their kids
what Japanese did during the war
and they like to believe they were the victims.
So not only Americans do, Japanmese are worse.

Yeah, at least American schools,
they teach their kids about
the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
but without almost no details.
They have seen the images of those mushroom clouds
but never seen the images of
what happened under those clouds.
Once you see the whole piture,
you can tell they were not justifiable.

I will never go back to the peace museum,
I do not want to,
once was enough for me.
But I believe everybody should visit once
if they have a chance.
This is not about who is right or who is wrong.
This is about the truth should be told
and not making mistakes any more.

Are you offended because you do not believe
America could make mistakes?
Hello, this is the country
where Blacks had been lynced until the end of '60s.
And the most recently
U.S. has killed tons of innocent Iraquians for oil
and for the totally unjustifiable reasons.
Have you ever thought about
how many people grieving there and
how many kids starving now
because they lost their fathers?
Now you are really offended
because you started to feel guilty
and you wanna hate and curse me.
Yeah, Americans are always right,
the greatest people of the world.

Sigh........