August 15 was the end of World War II in Asia, 69 years ago, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I could not find a single reference to the bombings, or to the end of the war itself, anywhere in the American media. Even the Yazidis in Iraq, a big story a week ago, had yielded to the death of Robin Williams, who gave up his place at the top of the news to the shooting of a young African-American man in Missouri. There may be something else dominating the national agenda by the time you read this.
We get Japanese TV at my house, NHK, their version of public television, and the news shows from Japan on August 15 were dominated by stories about the war. Maybe it was because Japan hadn't gone to war again since 1945, or maybe because the country was so devastated by the war, it wasn't clear, but there was only the briefest of news recaps about global events other than the end of World War II. It mattered a lot to them.
In addition to all the expected black and white footage, there was a live talk show, featuring a well-known entertainer talking about her childhood experiences during the war. The entertainer, born male, identifies as female and was on the talk show in women's clothing and a feminine hairstyle, the hair dyed honey bee yellow. Her looks were purposefully garish, at first distracting, and it is doubtful that the next Ken Burns documentary on PBS would feature a trans person in such a serious setting, but Japan is a different place as they say.
Here are two stories she related:
She remembers going with her mother to the train station to see her older brother off to war. He was a reluctant soldier, a draftee near the end of the conflict. His mom was waving goodbye as the train pulled away, and suddenly shouted "Come back, come back to me." Such sentiments were to be unspoken in wartime Japan; a soldier was to expect to die in battle, sacrificing himself for the nation, the Emperor, something. It was late enough in the war then that no one expected the soldiers to come home victorious, the only other acceptable outcome, though that was not spoken of out loud either.
They were expected to die, and the mother's spontaneous cry was an affront. Her son -- ashamed? embarrassed? afraid? -- ducked his head inside the train and was blended into the mass of other soldiers. He would indeed die in battle, maybe fighting on Guam, maybe Saipan, maybe somewhere else, it was unclear in the chaos of things. At the train station was the last time he would see his mother, and she him.
The day was not over. The entertainer on modern TV explained that almost simultaneously with his mother's outcry to her son to come home, a police officer grabbed her and slammed her into a telephone pole, opening a gash on her head that bled into her eyes. You're lucky I don't arrest you for sedition, old woman, he said. You are a disgrace, go home.
The entertainer lost her mother in the Nagasaki atomic bombing. She claims her mother died hunched over an even younger sibling, shielding him from the firestorm. The entertainer claims she saw her mother's flesh in ribbons. That was the last time she would see her mother, and perhaps the mother had a last glance at another of her children before she was consumed, again, by the war.
Entertainers are of course in the business of being, well, entertaining, so one must always reserve a bit of skepticism about the fullness of any story so neatly told.
But we'll be generous to the entertainer in her recollections.
Many terrible things happen in wars, and whether every detail the entertainer shared was true, or embellished, or just made up, matters little. There are real horrors in war, some so terrible that no one could believe they were true, or that they were not embellished, or that some horrible mind did not make them up.