I read
Mainichi Shimbun online on the daily, pun intended. I was reading about the uproar that was caused by the Prime Minister of Japan Junichiro Koizumi's trip to the
Yasukuni Shrine. There are
class A war criminals that are enshrined at Yasukuni. All over Asia there were protests in front of Japanese Embassies. The Prime Minister defended his visit to the shrine & noted that he does not support militarism or celebrate the war criminals' actions.
The war crimes committed by Japan in WWII were despicable. We should never forget what happened so that shit will never happen again. Pretty much all of my friends, including myself, have blood relations with people that were directly effected by the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Empire of Japan's occupation of the Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong & Korea. That little fact still trips me out to this day.
There comes a time when you have to let go of the past or you can't move on anymore because the negative past weighs you down. I'm going to take a little of my own personal philosphy on how to be a man & use it in a way that will help me to explain how I feel Asia will be able to move on from what happened in WWII & create goodwill between Asian countries.
My biological father, by all accounts treated my mother badly. I love my mother to death, as I should, & growing up without my father ate away at me. As I grew up I began to hate my father after hearing from my relatives how my mother was treated by him. I vowed that if the man that was my biological father was ever in front of me I would help him to realize what he had done to my mother & I was wrong. I would physically help him to understand the pain that I felt growing up, I'm sure that you all can get what I'm saying when I say "help him". In other words, I would make my father pay in flesh for the pain he caused my mother & I.
To me my father was a womanizer, drug dealer, woman beater, gangster etc etc.
I got my chance when I was 27 years old. My father found out that he was terminally ill, & he wanted to make ammends for the wrong he had done. He wanted to get to know me before he passed on. At the time I was unemployed & had fallen on hard times, my longtime girlfriend had recently left me. I was a mess emotionally, financially. To supplement my unemployement benefits I started hustling. I was not in the best mindstate to be meeting with a man that I had such a deep hatred for. My father was receiving treatments at Trippler Army Hospital in Hawaii so I used the money I earned selling drugs to fly to Hawaii & meet him.
I walked to the Hotel that the VA had set my father up in, it was just off the strip. When I first laid eyes on my father he looked weak & frail. Both father & son knew each other, without question, on site. We walked along the beach & chilled while the sun went down, it was a stunning setting. I knew the man was sick, he looked like a skeleton. He began to tell me his side of the story & something inside me snapped, & I remembered that he was only a man & wasn't perfect. I realized that he himself had been through alot as a Vietnam war veteran that had seen combat. My mother's pregnancy was unexpected & he was confused. Then I remembered what I, as a man, had done. I had broken the law, robbed & stolen from people, sold drugs, lied, & cheated. There were people that I've hurt too. Remembering that I was not perfect & remembering that I also hurt others, I was able to forgive him.
I believe in Karma. In a way I feel my father was suffering for what he had done in his life by having to endure the horrible cancer alone. As a man I felt that it was wrong for me to try & punish my father for the wrong he did to my mother & I while he was in such a horrible state. I did not want to have that on my conscience. Afterall
I also have debts to repay & bad karma to reverse. Punishing a dying man would not help me to achieve this.
What I needed to feel was that my father knew he was wrong, & I needed to feel that he was sorry for what had happened. He looked me in the eye & apologized. Rather than beat up on an old sick man emotionally or physically, I chose to accept the apology from my father, albeit 27 years late. I looked inside myself & understood that I was also responsible for someone else's pain. I also was able to let go of what happened in the past (not forget mind you) & make use of what little time my father had left on this panet so-called earth to forge some kind of relationship with the man. This experience really helped me to try & work on my own issues & start working on reversing some of my own bad karma. I also try & learn from what my mother & father went through.
I believe for Asia to move on, Japan has to apologize sincerely to Asia, it has to own the horrible past that it is responsible for. Japan has to not be afraid to be imperfect in the eyes of it's people for a change. Japan then has to work together with it's Asian neighbors to create a bright future for the region. The people of Asian countries that Japan committed warcrimes against during WWII have to be able to let go of the hatred spawned by the warcrimes. They have to be willing to work together with Japan in creating the bright future for the region.
Maybe I went a little overboard in relating my own experience to this current event but hey this is Tsuj no uchi, kick rocks if you don't like it. My pops = Japan during WWII. Tsuji = Japan's Asian neighbors. I don't know if it's the chronic I smoked or what, but sometimes I make these wierd connections in my head.
Damn that was kinda psycho...
I once read that learning from your personal micro universe will help you to deal with the macro universe.
