All the Hiroshima atomic stuff and how to fight past wars and morality with historical hindsight seems different for blogs I read.

I’ve got my thoughts and history, but that is not why I post this entry.

Bits of perspective to add to the Hiroshima stuff follows.

The last time I visited the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima a bunch of kids on a school trip there rushed up to have their pictures taken with me. I felt sheepish (for historical reasons), but then the light bulb went on for me. These kids saw me as part of some distant past they read about in school. Their world was way past WWII and Hiroshima. So I posed for a bunch of pictures, and still feel funny telling this story. And you would not know Hiroshima today from the post bomb pictures. Kind of like why Atlanta citizens joke about Sherman being the first Atlanta urban renewal person.

Well, just a little while later I am in Pearl Harbor at the land and later ship museum for the USS Arizona. There must have a been a gazillion very young Japanese tourists at both sites, and the same feeling of the world-has-passed -me-by-historically crosses my mind. These nice young people were not enemies, just tourists visiting historic sites. Kinda hurts my feelings, you know.

With age, does come wisdom. But the world does not stop.

To date myself, prior to my first visit to Hiroshima and the Peace Museum, I had been in Tokyo when the Japanese police were rehearsing for the upcoming G-8 conference. They were throwing up roadblocks and screens everywhere as part of the training. Even though I and my buddy kinda looked like middle east types, and we were Marines on the way to run the Kintai Marathon near Iwakuni, and I expected to be detained, it never happened. And my buddy, from Boston, really did look middle eastern to me.

And on filtering press reporting, all the adverse reporting of the US military presence in Okinawa is understandable to me. What is never reported is the Okinawan objection to the Japanese Self Defense Force people there with the US. To me the Okinawans object to all militaries, not just the US people. I attribute this to poor reporting, as opposed to agenda reporting.