Hiroshima

I forgot to mention, but yesterday was one of the biggest anniversaries marked in Japan - Hiroshima. Every year the papers are full of discussions on the morality of the decision to bomb and, quite rightly, conclude that war is a bad thing. If you want to learn about the Second World War, Japan is probably not the best place to be - every April (the start of the school year here) there are debates about officially approved high school textbooks that skirt the issue of Korean women forced into prostitution during the war, and descriptions of the Nanking Massacre as little more than a picnic that got out of hand. My wife's sum knowledge of the Second World War from Japanese high school is Pearl Harbor happened in 1941 and then Japan was A-bombed mercilessly in 1945. Blame (and detail) is never attached, merely the bland truism "war is bad". Mind you, in the midst of an Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, I don't feel I can get on my high horse and lecture Japan about virtue in war. One of my students grew up in Hiroshima and her grandmother and grandfather were in the city when it was struck. They were lucky that they lived on the outskirts of the city and the day of the bomb the father called in sick. Just as well. His factory and workmates were obliterated. If he had been feeling well that day, I would have had one fewer student today.  She can still remember playing in her grandparents' house and touching scorched wood that was left from the blast.I asked if her grandparents harboured any ill feeling towards Americans and Westerners after witnessing the horror of Hiroshima. "Oh, no," she said, "war is bad, not people."