

70 years ago I was spending a summer holiday with my parents in Abersoch North Wales, then a rather sleepy seaside resort.  My father,  a doctor had saved up,  slightly illicitly I imagine, some of his petrol allowance to get us there before going back to work in Liverpool. .    It was a Sunday which may or may not have been VJ Day itself, but the preacher was certainly exulting in the Allied victory and damning  the iniquities of the enemy in the Far East,  the hated Japanese.   
A few days before, my mother and I in preparing for the trip  had gone shopping in Liverpool. She had taken me to a News Theatre where, you may remember, people used to kill an hour or letting Pathe News or Moveitone show what was going on in the world.   
And something cataclysmic  had been going on in far away Japan,  in the city of  Hiroshima as the newsreel showed us.    Memory plays tricks, I know, but in my mind's eye I can see the mushroom cloud and the devastation of Hiroshima and recall pictures of a young boy, severely burned, with the commentator telling us, rather in the clipped tones of those days,   that in future years the child would remember that " I got these scars on Atom Day". 
That comment and the images of the newsreel, coupled with the jingoistic gloating, of the Welsh nonconformist preacher at church, were to leave  a strong impression on my young mind.  But I just absorbed it at the time without making judgements, more with curiosity rather than emotion.   I had just passed my sixth birthday.  
I sometimes wonder whether that newsreel was a bit of a divine nudge in my life.  On our way to study and live Japan 18 years after that VJ day,  Chrystal and I read in The Times a piece by their Far East correspondent that began "   Tokyo rebuffs.  In the caverns of the world's largest city, there is a deafening failure to communicate  " , meaning essentially a failure to communicate between Japanese and Westerners  and  the writer went on to describe the Japanese "drooping under their fading courtesies".  I made up my mind that there would be no deafening failure to communicate for us.  
 We took to Japan with gusto grappling with the complications of its language and the 1881 Chinese based written characters to learn for our exams.   It wasn't all raw fish:  but we enjoyed the new tastes;  we sweltered in hot springs, we found motor bikes that started at the touch of a button, radios that you could hold in one hand and the world's first novel written in the 11[th] century by a woman.  There were so many joys of new discoveries.   But above all we found a country where kindness and politeness and regard for ones neighbour a friendship  and a sense of obligation were an integral part of living.  Deep friendships were formed in an experience that lasted the best part of 15 years.   We found that we had developed two personalities,  in two countries.  
Against that background, these last two weeks I have been experiencing several conflicting emotions as in this country we have been remembering the two atomic bombs. Yesterday I watched a commemorative service on VJ Day's 70[th] anniversary where bemedalled veterans, and ex-prisoners of war who had suffered terribly at the hands of the Japanese, reminisced about their experiences.   How was it possible, I asked myself, that some members of this gentle, polite and kind race from a country that I had come to love, with their highly developed culture,  could have behaved in the way they did in China and South-east Asia ?   
We didn't go to church much in Japan. It is not of course is a Christian country, though Christianity flourishes.   But now that I look back on it our life there, it seems to me, it taught us more about loving one's neighbour that I ever learned here in my first 24 year before we got on the boat to Yokohama.  It was in a way a preparation for re-discovering our Christian faith at home. 
In the newspaper last week there was piece by a radio critic headlined :  " I will never forget this account of Hiroshima"  in which she drew attention to a 15 minute radio interview with the oldest living survivor of the atomic bomb, a medical doctor Shuntaro Hida, now 98.  I listened to it again on my computer. The doctor describes how he cycled to the city from a village outside Hiroshima after the bomb had exploded,  meeting strange black shapes stumbling towards him, dropping dead before he recognised them as human.  He spent the rest of his life treating bomb victims and campaigning against nuclear weapons.  
Another time, another world, remembered over a lifetime, impossible, as the journalist said, for anyone who heard the programme forget it.  
The other lesson it seems to me that we can take away from these events of 70 years ago is the need for forgiveness.  Too often, I fear, those in this country who were the victims of Japanese cruelties and witnessed atrocities, find it hard to forgive.  But that inability to forgive on the part of the victim can blight a life. It is self defeating.   Forgiveness is at the heart of the concept of  restorative justice, and our Christian faith.  Are there certain things or people that cannot be forgiven ?  Not in God's eyes, if they repent. 
It is time now to forgive the atrocities of yesteryear, if not to forget the 140,000 killed in an instant in Hiroshima, the thousands who died on the Thai Railway or in the Rape of Nanking.  No one is innocent of yesterdays hatreds.  We have to go on trying to build a world on the concept of love.  " There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival the only meaning ".    





