"god made her eyes for crying at birth / then left the ground to circle the earth"

[larryhammer]

From Letters of Note (via), a letter from a Kamikaze bomber to his two young children written the night before he died in the Battle of Okinawa.

---L.

Comments

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

My grandfather was at Okinawa, an enlisted man in an Army unit which suffered grave casualties there. He lived to father two more children (one of whom was my father), and came home with a sword he'd taken from a dead enemy. Family legend said that my grandfather must have killed an officer, someone important; only high-level officers had swords. A year or two ago, after my grandfather died, I researched the sword on the Internet. It was a NCO sword, neither rare nor important.

That is to say, thank you for posting that letter. It has a strange effect on me, but I don't have words to articulate why.

[larryhammer]

It is ... interesting to read reportage, especially memoir-type or about the daily life, on different different sides of WWII. Following American dispatches from the Pacific War with Town of Evening Call, Country of Cherry Blossoms was especially disturbing.

There were lives lost and lives redeemed on all sides of that hell.

---L.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Yes. I wish I knew more about them all. (To which the proper solution is, of course, "Then go research!")

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Fascinating, especially the alternate translations in the comments. Combining the original trans. and the alternates begins to show the shape of the culture in the parallax. (Of course, some of the rest of the comments make me want to wash my species' brain out with soap, but... 8>S )

[larryhammer]

I hadn't scrolled down far enough to get to that alternate translation -- because of that trolling. I'd mentally applied part of it (god > guardian spirit, as people get kami wrong all the time) but hadn't known some of the rest.

(I find it especially interesting that it's written in katakana. Using kana makes sense if it really was written for his son to read, but nowadays, children first learn hiragana, the other syllabic script. OTOH, I believe katakana was used for telegrams -- maybe this was to be transmitted rather than delivered physicially?)

---L.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

It just makes me feel sorry for everybody immediately involved. His victims, himself, his wife ('be good for your mother') and the children ('I can't be your horse'). How did their life go after that?

[larryhammer]

I want to know what happened to the children, especially.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

This is just so ... human. Real.