The Real Cost Of War

I have a friend who was born in Japan in the late 1930’s. She is now an American citizen. A few years ago she shared her story with a local newspaper. I would like to share some highlights of her story here.

In March of 1945, she and one of her sisters were sent away from Tokyo to her grandparents’ home in Miyazaki on Kyushu to keep them safe. Her father remained behind. Her father was a high-ranking officer in the Japanese military.

She shares a story of a day at her grandparents’ home when she was pretending to go to school (her sisters went, but she was still too young) and heard the air raid warning siren. She laid down on the concrete road as flat as she could, then ran home as soon as the airplanes passed. Following that incident, she stayed close to her grandparents’ home where she could seek shelter in the bushes in the backyard.

During the time at her grandparents’ house, she traveled to Hiroshima with her mother and sisters to see cousins. While there, her mother received a call from her father to leave immediately. Her mother quickly left and returned to Miyazaki. The family later learned that their cousins had been killed in the bombing of Hiroshima.

She then traveled with her mother and sisters to visit friends in Nagasaki. Within two days of their arrival, her father called and told them to return to Miyazaki. They later found out that the friends they were visiting in Nagasaki were killed in the bombing.

She shares the story of spending a lot of time in an underground bunker at her grandparents’ home. They were in the bunker when they heard the news of the Japanese surrender. The day after the announcement, her father called and asked the family to return to Tokyo immediately. They boarded a train to Tokyo and were treated very well when some of the military officers on board recognized them and realized that they were related to their former superior officer (her father). They were escorted to the front of the train where there were soldiers carrying square wooden boxes wrapped in white scarves. Each soldier had an empty seat next to him reserved for his wooden box. Each box contained the ashes of a fallen soldier. In her story, she notes that as the train passed through Hiroshima, all the shutters were drawn so that the passengers could not see the devastation.

When the family arrived back in Tokyo, there were only a handful of houses left standing. Everything was flat and burnt.

There is more to the story. The lady telling this story was the daughter of a high-ranking Japanese officer who attempted to persuade the emperor to end the war in order to avoid the bombing of Japan that he knew was coming. Obviously the emperor ignored the advice. Her father was eventually relieved of his command just before the end of World War II.

I share this story for a number of reasons. The main reason is to illustrate that although war is sometimes necessary, it is a horrible thing. It has a great impact on the society and culture that is involved in the fighting. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a horrible first step into the atomic age, but without those bombs, many more lives would have been lost and the Japanese culture would have probably been destroyed as a result of an invasion of Japan.

The lesson here is that although war is a horrible thing, there are times when it must be fought. When it is fought, it must be fought hard in order to end quickly the death and destruction that it brings. That is the lesson we seem to have forgotten since the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I hope we never see another atomic bomb dropped, but I also hope we have the wisdom and courage to do what we need to do in order to end quickly any war that we must fight.