Similarities of being different
...written on 9.10.01, @ 1:32 a.m.
Tales of Kim's Life in Japan
Sun September 10, 2001
I sat in the stadium seating movie theatre, and in my peripheral vision, saw Yasuyo with her hands to her mouth in horror. I too, sat clenched in dread as the bright flashes of exploding bombs illuminated all of the other patrons in the theatre, allowing me to see that I was the lone American among a matinee crowd of Japanese watching Japanese war planes bomb Pearl Harbor.
Yasuyo would later remark that she felt good about sitting next to me. She felt that since she was Japanese and I was American and that we were friends, said a lot about how far our countries have come since World War II.
That may be so, but I still felt awful there. It reminded me of two times in the Dominican Republic when I went to see American movies and wished that the earth would just swallow me up so no one would see me leaving the lobby. In those cases, the Americans were at fault. In "Missing" with Sissy Spacek, it was the American Goverment that came off looking so deceitful and in "Little Darlings" with Tatum O'Neill and Kristy McNicol, I felt shame for a culture where 14 yr old girls raced to be the first to have sex. Many people all over the world garner their ideas of Americans from exported movies and such.
I asked Yasuyo how she felt about the movie, Pearl Harbor and she said that both the Japanese and the Americans were bad. I asked her why she thought the Americans were bad and she said because we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and many innocent people were killed (that wasn't in the movie, but it certainly was part of the war).
Hide told me that he saw the movie in Athens, Georgia this summer and that at the end of it, a man stood up and yelled, "This isn't just a movie! This really happened!" Hide said everyone ignored his crazy shouts.
People say that the Japanese have tried to gloss over their part in World War II and not admit to many of the atrocities they commited (tortures, beheadings, sex slavery, etc.). That their history books don't give a full and fair treatment of the subject, that the Japanese children thus don't have any idea of what that "day of infamy" stands for.
Today I asked myself if I knew what it really was all about. I've never been involved in a war. In my generation and those after, there has not been a foreign invasion on American soil. I've never had to dodge rocks or rockets, go running for cover, or drag wounded or dying friends and family to safety.
I've seen two disturbing pictures in the paper recently. One was from the Middle East and showed a Palestinian woman being kicked at and pulled on by two Israeli children. The other picture was of two Protestant school girls in uniform in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Protestants blew air horns, whistles, and banged trash can lids at a line of Catholic mothers and daughters heading home after school to retaliate for attacks by Catholic militants.
I just wish the people of the world could stop fighting and recognize the humanity that each of us has. That we all have family and friends and goals and dreams and that we aren't all that different after all.