I did not forget about the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the nuclear bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. There’s plenty of comments about it, in the so-called websphere. Right? Wrong? I personally don’t care and just like Alfons, I have mixed feelings about this whole anniversary, because of the fact that our parents survived the war because of a sudden capitulation of the Japanese Emperial Forces after the bombing of those cities (As most Japanese campsurvivors [and next of kin of them] know, the problems were actually just about to start after that, but that’s another sad story). On the other hand, the loss of life at such a massive (and sudden) scale is truly a sad chapter in the history of mankind.
An interesting detail is that, when asking my dad if he ever hated the Japanese, he replied that that was actually a ridiculous thought:
‘Why bother hating others for things that were done by the Imperial forces? It’s only sad to hear that not everybody in Japan has learnt or been taught about what they did to us. The bombs didn’t make everything even nor set things right: it just made it clear that this was all so senseless, particularly when you’re a kid’
And those words, make all the discussions about the bombs look pretty sad, how well-meant they are: how many soldiers would have died vs. the death of innocent lifes isn’t just a ‘formula’ where you strike out the sum on both sides of the equation sign. At the end, what counts is that both my parents (and others, fellow-Dutch, Japanese and Koreans) made it.