Lives Caught Between the Two Sides of a Card

As Japan approaches August 15, memories of war return through television, family stories, and the news. Peace and madness can sometimes seem as close as the two sides of a single card—and countless human lives may lie between them.

Last night, NHK aired a drama about the young Osamu Tezuka, the man later known as the “God of Manga.”

He was born in 1928, and when the war ended in 1945, he was still only sixteen.

The drama depicted him narrowly escaping death during an air raid.

He saw many people wounded and killed before his eyes, and one line stayed with me:

“So this is what hell looks like.”

My wife, who was watching with me, said it reminded her of something her father often talked about.

He had survived the great air raid on Yokohama, and he said that one of the hardest things was having to step over many dead bodies as he fled.

What came back to my mind was something my mother once told me.

“I remember Yoshi-san”—my grandmother—“turning on the light in the room on the night of August 15 and saying, ‘It’s all right now, isn’t it?’”

Both kinds of scenes appeared in last night’s drama.

War seems to exist somewhere between sanity and madness, like the front and back of a card.

And when I imagine tens of thousands of human lives caught within that single thin card, I feel helplessly saddened.

In the news, I heard that a man in Ukraine who had been recovering the bodies of people killed in the war died in an explosion as he was getting into a vehicle.

The exact circumstances are not clear, but it is not difficult to imagine what may have happened.

To add yet more suffering to the deaths caused by war, and to the grief already carried by the bereaved.

How cruel can human beings become?

Or perhaps that cruelty appears cruel only when seen from one side.

Seen from the other side, perhaps someone could claim that it is not cruel at all.

Every year, as Japan marks the anniversary of the end of the war, Japanese people are once again made to confront war.

It is summer, and sometimes I think perhaps we should be enjoying ourselves more.

But perhaps this is something like a cross that Japanese people have been given to carry.

Even so, will all of this eventually become nothing more than a distant past?

I hope that this desire to mourn and remember, too, will remain caught between the two sides of that card.

I hope that our remembrance of the dead will always remain between the two sides of the card—between sanity and madness, peace and war.

 

・・・ 

narrowly escape death
To survive a situation in which one came very close to dying.
九死に一生を得る

air raid
An attack in which aircraft drop bombs or launch weapons on a place.
空襲

sanity
A state of rational and mentally sound thought or behavior.
正気

madness
Extremely irrational, violent, or uncontrolled behavior or thinking.
狂気

the bereaved
People who are grieving because someone close to them has died.
遺族

recover a body
To find and retrieve the remains of someone who has died.
遺体を回収する

confront
To face and deal with something difficult or painful.
向き合う

a cross to carry
A continuing burden, responsibility, or suffering that someone must bear.
背負うべき十字架、重荷

distant past
A period of history that feels far removed from the present.
遠い過去

remembrance
The act of remembering and honoring someone or something from the past.
追憶、慰霊、記憶

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