Hey guys, I just wanted to follow-up yesterday's post. It was a difficult subject on Hiroshima and cultural perspectives, so I felt that a follow-up was needed.
As I had mentioned in the post, this topic of cultural perspective pertaining to World War II was brought up by the excerpts I had to read of Ota Yoko's "The City of Corpses" for class. The excerpts were, in fact, the first 3 chapters from the book, which has 7 chapters in total. The first chapter dealt with the atomic sickness from a human perspective, the second dealt with the scientific perspective of the a-sickness, and the third chapter was Ota's experience of Aug 6th. The first chapter, to me, is the most difficult to read due to the emotional response it conjurs within the reader. But, each chapter is difficult in its own way. They are each very informative, but do not convey a sort of "pity-party" for Hiroshima. As harsh as that sounds, sometimes accounts of difficult events are made romanticize the events to invoke guilt. Ota does not do this, which is why it is so difficult emotionally. Her work is more journalistic in that sense.
So, in class, we had two days of discussing "The City of Corpses" as a literary work, rather than as a historical book. I actually was so emotionally disturbed by this book, that I left class for a few minutes yesterday. Today, it choked me up but the response was nowhere near as bad as yesterday. Because I had to bottle up my tears yesterday, I was actually getting sick feeling in class. Never had I experience such a powerful response to anything like this. But, I realized yesterday that my response was in part due to the fact that I am caught between the Japanese and American cultures that still are wounded from WWII. This was why I was trying to stress that I was not trying to put blame on either side, but rather acknowledging the conflictions between these two cultures.
But today, I realized something else about the book. As I was reading, the imagery, both in physical objects and emotional responses, were so vivid to me. It was partially due to Ota herself being to successful in conveying the scene at hand. However, there was another reason why the imagery was so powerfully conveyed. It had nothing to do with Ota's writing. Rather, it was from my own experience.
Ota described the scene following the bomb's explosion as people emerging from the wreckage, bloodied with ash-colored skin. Mind you, this is not a direct quote, but a merging of terminology and descriptions she gave. Ash rained down from the skies as people chaotically ran about, trying to figure out what had just happened to them and their city.
Did we not just experience this scene in our own lifetime?
The descriptions in "The City of Corpses" unconsciously brought back visions of 9/11. Wrapped perfectly in the setting of Hiroshima, I failed at first to recognize my own memories of our horrific experience. I also had never really experienced 9/11 with such devouring anger and twisting of emotions, so it was not clear to me that my memories were intertwining with Ota's memories and experiences. But is this not how grief works?
Grief is not something that should come natural to us. We were, in some ways, not intended to experience separation and evil within the world. I say "some ways", my Christian friends, because though God had made us to be in a relationship with us, He knew that we would be engulfed by sin and still allowed it to happen. Thus, "in some ways" we weren't meant to experience grief.
As a result, mentally we can't fully comprehend grief and thus cannot truly experience it emotionally, either. We will never be able to fully process the grief we experience. That is why it continues to return, resurfacing years and decades later. That is why parents, who lost their own mothers and fathers early in life, will grieve over at their own children's weddings, unable to experience this miraculous event with their mother and/or father.
Our inability to fully process grief is also the reason why mothers who have had an abortion will be devastated years later when they realize their aborted baby will never experience life and its miracles. This is also why we grieve for our pets years after they have passed on.
Having been a middle-aged child when 9/11 occurred, I was unable to fully grieve for our nation's loss. There was a disconnect within myself and within the nation between our mental processing of the tragic and our emotional response to it. We were deadened to our emotions, lost in the sea of confusion, pain, anger, and fear. I can honestly say that I have never been able to deal with my emotions from that day. That is why year after year I rewatch the footage from that day and from the days after it, hoping to invoke such an emotional response to it that I can finally sort out what I felt that day. This wish, however, is impossible because the colossal size of such tragic is too much for our feeble human minds and hearts to fully comprehend.
That is also why we can find outlets for our emotions, allowing us to deal with them in way that is separated from the source of our grief. "The City of Corpses" was my outlet this week. Eleven years after 9/11 and I still have grieving left to work through. That is why amongst our WWII survivors, there is still anger towards the Japanese. There is still anger towards us from our Japanese counterparts, as well. But, maybe we can learn to understand why our two nations acted the way they did and finally direct our anger to the real reason World War II happened. That reason is the brokenness of humans and its manipulation by Satan.
Til then, Later Peeps.
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