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Authors: Peter Carey
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Maybe hell was something like this.
“I couldn’t go back to Tokyo, because it was being bombed every night. Obviously, I couldn’t stay in Kofu because there was nothing left. So mymother decided to send me to Mi to, where my sister was, and then she went back to Tokyo to be with my father.
“This was when I wished I had died in the first air raid, so I would not have had to experience all these terrible things. However, I went to Mi to, where I would be safe—and guess what happened?
“Three days before the end of the war, Mito was shelled by the American navy. Fortunately, my grandmother’s house was very close to the coast, so the shells passed overhead. But the noise was horrific. It felt like an earthquake and the earthquake was happening every second. The house shook and shuddered. There were pauses in the shelling, though never a pause we could calculate. We’d think it was all over, and begin dinner again, but then it would start and go on and on and on. We knew why they were shelling us. They were getting ready to land their troops.
“I went to school most days. We spent our time making bamboo spears we could use to kill the American soldiers when they invaded. Because our school was about an hour and a half from my grandmother’s place, I was sometimes too frightened to come home alone and often spent the night at school.
“Suddenly, on August I , the ships disappeared from the coast. It was a very quiet, peaceful time.Then, on August 15 the war ended. This current prime minister is too young to know anything about the war, so this is why he feels he can visit the shrine of the army’s war dead, and why he thinks we should change the constitution so Japan can have an army once again.
“When I talk to young people, they all say war is bad, war is frightening, but if you ask if they would defend their country, they all say yes. This attitude is very different from mine.
“How about you, Carey-san, I don’t suppose you experienced the war?”
“Not really, Mr. Yazaki, but I do remember playing with Japanese army occupation money as a child.”
Mr. Yazaki was silent a moment. I had no idea what he was feeling.
“I am thinking,” he offered, “about the people in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Palestine, and I think about how it is for those children. We read a book called A Farewell to Arms , but when will we finally say good-bye to them?”
6.
Heart of Animation
Beats in a Robot Boy
By James Brooke
TOKYO, April 6— Back in 1951, Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese cartoonist, dreamed up Astro Boy, a lovable robot with laser fingertips, search-light eyes, machine guns in his black shorts, and rocket jets flaming from his red boots.
To make the 100,000 horsepower tyke seem really futuristic, the artist gave his creation a truly far-out birth date: April 7, 2003.
Tokyo may not yet have flying cars, but Astro Boy’s official birthday on Monday marks the coming of age of Japan’s animation industry. No longer marginalized, the bare-chested rocket boy with the spiky hair, known in Japanese as Tetsuwan Atom [literally Iron-Arm Atom] is being hailed with fireworks, costume parades, intellectual seminars, an exhibit in Parliament and a $1 million diamond-and-ruby likeness in a downtown department store display.
“We Japanese want to live alongside robots, that is why we love Astro Boy,” said Takao Imai, a 72 year old lawyer, dressed in a white smock and a white wig of cotton curls to look like Professor Elefun, Astro Boy’s eccentric scientist protector.
This appeared in the New York Times well after our return from Tokyo, but that quote— we Japanese want to live alongside robots —recalled again this common but inexplicable enthusiasm.
At first I had been tempted to regard the robot as a kind of mechanised Godzilla, a metaphor for the technological might of the atomic bomb. This, however, was undercut by my discovery of a wild andterrifying cartoon produced two years before Hiroshima, titled Kagaku Senshi Nyū Yōku
“I couldn’t go back to Tokyo, because it was being bombed every night. Obviously, I couldn’t stay in Kofu because there was nothing left. So mymother decided to send me to Mi to, where my sister was, and then she went back to Tokyo to be with my father.
“This was when I wished I had died in the first air raid, so I would not have had to experience all these terrible things. However, I went to Mi to, where I would be safe—and guess what happened?
“Three days before the end of the war, Mito was shelled by the American navy. Fortunately, my grandmother’s house was very close to the coast, so the shells passed overhead. But the noise was horrific. It felt like an earthquake and the earthquake was happening every second. The house shook and shuddered. There were pauses in the shelling, though never a pause we could calculate. We’d think it was all over, and begin dinner again, but then it would start and go on and on and on. We knew why they were shelling us. They were getting ready to land their troops.
“I went to school most days. We spent our time making bamboo spears we could use to kill the American soldiers when they invaded. Because our school was about an hour and a half from my grandmother’s place, I was sometimes too frightened to come home alone and often spent the night at school.
“Suddenly, on August I , the ships disappeared from the coast. It was a very quiet, peaceful time.Then, on August 15 the war ended. This current prime minister is too young to know anything about the war, so this is why he feels he can visit the shrine of the army’s war dead, and why he thinks we should change the constitution so Japan can have an army once again.
“When I talk to young people, they all say war is bad, war is frightening, but if you ask if they would defend their country, they all say yes. This attitude is very different from mine.
“How about you, Carey-san, I don’t suppose you experienced the war?”
“Not really, Mr. Yazaki, but I do remember playing with Japanese army occupation money as a child.”
Mr. Yazaki was silent a moment. I had no idea what he was feeling.
“I am thinking,” he offered, “about the people in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Palestine, and I think about how it is for those children. We read a book called A Farewell to Arms , but when will we finally say good-bye to them?”
6.
Heart of Animation
Beats in a Robot Boy
By James Brooke
TOKYO, April 6— Back in 1951, Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese cartoonist, dreamed up Astro Boy, a lovable robot with laser fingertips, search-light eyes, machine guns in his black shorts, and rocket jets flaming from his red boots.
To make the 100,000 horsepower tyke seem really futuristic, the artist gave his creation a truly far-out birth date: April 7, 2003.
Tokyo may not yet have flying cars, but Astro Boy’s official birthday on Monday marks the coming of age of Japan’s animation industry. No longer marginalized, the bare-chested rocket boy with the spiky hair, known in Japanese as Tetsuwan Atom [literally Iron-Arm Atom] is being hailed with fireworks, costume parades, intellectual seminars, an exhibit in Parliament and a $1 million diamond-and-ruby likeness in a downtown department store display.
“We Japanese want to live alongside robots, that is why we love Astro Boy,” said Takao Imai, a 72 year old lawyer, dressed in a white smock and a white wig of cotton curls to look like Professor Elefun, Astro Boy’s eccentric scientist protector.
This appeared in the New York Times well after our return from Tokyo, but that quote— we Japanese want to live alongside robots —recalled again this common but inexplicable enthusiasm.
At first I had been tempted to regard the robot as a kind of mechanised Godzilla, a metaphor for the technological might of the atomic bomb. This, however, was undercut by my discovery of a wild andterrifying cartoon produced two years before Hiroshima, titled Kagaku Senshi Nyū Yōku
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