German-Russian American with (technically but not practically) Jewish father and Japan-born mother goes to small village in Japan to promote internationalization in 2005.
I hadn't thought of that headline for my job until today when I realized that with all of my different backgrounds I may as well be the symbol of some of the greatest massacres of the 20th century. It's not easy sometimes. Quite ironically, my maternal grandparents fled Nazi Germany (where they would have most probably perished, based on their ideology and blood, with the more than 6 million who died after they escaped) around about 1933 and came to Japan, Germany's soon-to-be ally in the war. They ended up staying for around 14 years until they found away to move to another country involved in the war (on the other side), America. It is simplistic to assume that a country's national government represents the whole country. I, for one, had nothing to do with the war in Iraq. I never had a choice in the matter.
To finish the circle my mother ended up marrying a nice guy named Robert while they were grad students at Berkeley. Robert happened to be from a Russian, Jewish family (who left Russia before WWI). Not everyone knows this but over ~27 million Russians died during WWII. That made Russia the country with the greatest percentage lost during the war (14%) according to http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7232-1.cfm.
So I guess I have to live with the fact that many of my "peoples" have killed millions of each other in the past hundred years. I guess that makes my genes/ancestral past either masochistic or just really confused. I am certainly confused. Perhaps many foreigners here in Japan are. We are attempting the tightrope-walk of moving beyond our pasts without entirely forgetting them.
2 comments:
You cannot look at the past from the point of view of the aggressor - you were not alive when these things happened. Neither can you look at it from the point of view of the victim, since you are aware of the events in your common past. You have no need to be "betroffen," so long as you learn from your ancestors' actions.
If you were to forget completely, however, past mistakes could easily become today's. Shutting our eyes to the past is inviting it for dinner. Any country that decides to disacknowledge its violent misdeeds is potentially a threat to others.
It's what Japan has tried to do for decades. The result? Yasukuni, LDP apologists, right wing vans blaring pro-Emperor propaganda, institutionalised racism and censored media. And with Article 9 soon out of the way, what will stop a "preemtive" attack on North Korea if things were to get ugly?
Never forget that both apples and oranges are also fruit.
(Far be it from me trying to monopolise the truth about Japan, but the JET crowd is generally so clueless it's scary).
They are certainly still both fruit. Oranges just don't happen to taste very good in pie.
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