古里 を呼んでいる。
It's true-- take my word for it.
Getting packages from home makes me want to go home right now and be giggly with NWC friends. I love you guys so much. Thanks for remembering me halfway across the world.
In other news:
I saw Letters from Iwo Jima （硫黄島からの手紙）at the theater yesterday with my friend Kaoru. I thought since it was directed by Clint Eastwood that the dialogue would be English, but it was almost entirely in Japanese, and THERE WERE NO SUBTITLES. Needless to say, I was pretty confused the whole time, but I'm pretty sure it was a really good movie. When the lights came up after the credits rolled, an older gentleman in the row ahead of me looked back and saw me and stared for the longest time. I wanted to disappear. I felt that, with his stare, he was blaming me for all the deaths on Iwo Jima. I felt like I was insulting the Japanese by coming into their movie theater and watching a movie that portrayed so many soldiers who would rather commit suicide than surrender to the Americans. I talked with Kaoru about it. She said that nowadays most Japanese don't feel hostility toward Americans, but I wonder if, when they think back to the slaughter of the war, if they don't harbor some sort of resentment. After all, the children of the 40s were essentially taught that Americans were devils and that all good citizens would serve the emperor as their god. I wonder if the man who stared at me lost a relative at Iwo Jima, or at Pearl Harbor, or in the bombing of Osaka, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukuoka...
I don't know. I know so little about WWII that I probably don't understand how to deal with the past atrocities both our countries committed. How can I reconcile a past with a present so far removed? Yet, the cruelty, the violence portrayed in the film made me so sad. Did it really have to happen that way? |
Name: Ruthie