As i have been to both Germany and now Japan i suppose my Passport stamps would give some history teacher a hard-on. My love of all things Vespa may someday lead me to Italy to complete the WWII axis tour but war has never been my focus, it has just seemed to play such a huge role everywhere i visit. Even my favorite of destinations, Ireland, has a history weaved in battle.This photo is of a monument at Peace Park in Okinawa Japan. It was quite windy near the ocean on this otherwise oppressively hot day so it may not be clear from the image but the top of the cone is actually an eternal flame. i found the combination of water and fire used in this sculpture for peace to be quite inspiring. The whole park, in fact, is one of the most inspiring and well done memorials i have ever been to.
Visiting the site of a concentration camp in Germany was the heaviest place i have ever been. Not heavy in the dirty hippy sense of "you're talkin' some heavy shit man" but in the true gravity of the local. You just felt this heaviness come over you, this incredible weight. You can't help but be changed for having been there and stood face to face with what happened. It is a historic load we must carry around.
Although there were still strong aspects reminding us of the atrocities and sacrifices of war at the peace park, it was created in such a way that you leave with an incredible sense of hope. Hope the we can learn from this, hope that we can be better, hope that we will never have to experience something like this again.
Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the museum section of the park. As fitting for the subject matter, the display rooms were quite dark and kept in low light. There were plexiglassed walls displaying the "tsunami of steel" dropped by the US on the island, a re-creation of a cave where many citizens hid during battle complete with shaking tank sounds, and video - something quite unique for this war displaying just how recent in history it really was.
i am very glad that just before leaving for Japan i read my Grandfather's accounting of his time spent as a Marine fighting in the Pacific during WWII. Not only because it gave me a very personal account as experienced by those who lived it (as oppose to the somewhat sterile museum and history lesson accounts) but because, as one can imagine, the story was a bit one sided at the museum. One could have easily overlooked the tiny, brief mention of Pearl Harbor in the Japanese timeline of the war. That tiny event that changed everything, but such has always been my complaint about history: it is always scewed by the author.
After walking through all these dark rooms following the history of the war all of a sudden you turn this corner and are almost blinded by light and beauty as you enter a completely glassed in room overlooking the vast pacific ocean. One after another you heard audible reactions to this moving arrangement as people rounded the corner. Everyone tried to capture that beauty with cameras and then every one of us, no matter what culture or country we were from, eventually just sat back and soaked in the power of this room.
The museum piece made me realize something alluded to later in the week by a friend on the Marine base we were staying at. Looking through the history and timetable i realized that Japan up to that point had seemed to always have been at war. Widening out my perspective i came to acknowledge that in actuality, every country had actually always been at war with someone to some extent. There NEVER has been a time in which our society has been at peace.
The comment made by my friend, obviously trying to justify the fact that she lived on a US military base, was that peaceful societies don't survive, they are always conquered by warrior societies. At first i was quite upset by this statement but eventually realized that this has been true of our human history. Look even now at possibly our last peaceful corner of the planet, Tibet, and how it has been taken over and repeatedly abused by China.
The logical scientist in me, the punk curmudgeon in me, and the adult with over three decades of human observations in me all seem to have a hard time believing we have much of a future as a species when socially speaking we have seemed to show almost no evolution, yet i am still left with this sense of hope from the experience.
Maybe it is because i see all the potential in our species and what we are capable of. Mostly, i imagine, it is the effect that nature always seems to have on me... pulling that monk in me out. Looking out at the beauty of where the land meets the ocean, meets the sky how can you not be filled with the inspiration of what is possible.
