I got contacted by my great grandmother recently that she wanted to talk. She asked a lot about what I was doing. She had briefly heard about my activities lately from my aunt and she wondered if I would be game to translate something she wanted to say to everyone here. The following is her letter to us:
"Dear People of Reddit,
Thank you for taking care of my great grandson with his interests. I would like to relate a story to you.
When I was young, a very, very long time ago, Japan was brilliant. There were so many new wonderful things coming in from overseas and so many wonderful ways Japanese things were being reinvented and modernized for the modern age.
My favorite was a series of books that were like recipes. They had all sorts of Chinese and Western food in them. My imagination was set on fire just thinking about what they tasted like. I remember the day a new shop opened in our town and one of the items from the books that I had always wanted to taste was in the menu. It was on omelet made of rice and vegetables. I remember thinking it was heaven to taste and so different from anything I had ever eaten. It was a kind of combination of Japanese food and Western food. Back then that was a new thing.
That image of succulent eggs, rice and vegetables years later during the war saved me. Books like that were not allowed to be distributed anymore. English and Western terms had been re-imagined into horribly Japanese that didn't fit and their natural pronunciations were outlawed, so that one had to use Chinese characters for every term. It was there to assert in the ridiculous concept that all that was around us had been created by us Japanese.
Our family is a family of writers and my father, whom I was very angry with at the time, but now I understand, had died saying that, 'It is more honorable to die with the truth and than to live to spread lies.' I could not understand why my father would not just write what they told him to write back then. I was so angry that he left us behind.
I worked tirelessly every day in a factory that produced munitions for troops and I had no choice but to comply. To this day, my hands are warped from the experience. Back then all I understood was that all the color and vibrancy of things had been sucked out of the world around me. I dared not think of the freer days of my childhood because everybody told me it was a lie.
I can remember it very clearly. I had trouble thinking back then. Censorship will do that to you. At first, they are such trivial thoughts that you think, 'Surely, I can bend just to this. It's only polite.' You don't notice that the thoughts aren't coming as clearly as they used to, that they are being blocked by a certain mystical something you can't clearly see.
Then it becomes harder to remember the facts and the principles you know are true. Things like that people from different places can cooperate. That there is not a group of white imperialists trying to oppress all of Asia and that if we don't fight them we will be slaves to them, and if they ever arrive on Japanese shores that all their men will rape us. That the very notion is silly. Eventually, it gets so difficult to think that you might give in just to stop fighting and get along with what everyone else is saying.
In a corner of my mind, I would not give up. I had tasted omelet rice. I knew the idea could not have come solely from Japan. I remembered the word, even though it was forbidden. That was it, the memory that proved to me what I knew was true.
I had always wanted to start a restaurant of my own and have food from all over the world, healthy food that made for strong people. I did not know it back then, but what I was interested was the burgeoning fields of nutrition that had been brought from overseas. By the time the war ended and Japan began to walk a better path again, it was too late. My opportunities were gone. I would be grateful for just a refrigerator for my growing family. Many people told me that my interest in food was simply a passing fad and that I should not be so stubborn about such a silly, small thing.
But now as I look back and I see that many of my friends from that period have died, many of them have died bitterly. They never seemed to recover from mind censorship, never seemed to go back to being as vibrant thinkers as I knew them to be. They kept fitting into what they were told to fit into.
I know what kept me sane was the image of omelet rice. I know that sounds silly, but it is true. Those 'silly' books I was told were just children's fairy tales and not of any real importance. But those were the last links to reality I had when everything else had been cut off. I am so glad I held onto them. People will tell you that you should not worry if silly things are censored, but censorship is a jail for the mind, and the more of it you jail, even the silly things, the less the mind can travel freely. I eventually began to recover from it because I believed in a silly thing like my memory of how omelet rice tasted.
Many old people my age will tell you that your interests like phones and games and videos are just silly and you shouldn't get worked up about them. But I think you should. I do not like the way people act these days about what we ought and ought not to say. About words that should not be allowed or how hobbies are bad and must be censored. It reminds me too much of my father who drank himself to death after being forced to say too many words that were not his own.
I hope the same thing never happens again for anyone in any country, but if it does, the thing that you hold on to is the 'silly' things that you fight for because those are the things you have an attachment to. We hope they do not, but people do change. Your memories of lovely things will not. They will always be there to anchor your reality and some people will want to tell you're imagining things, but I assure you, you are not.
A wise woman named Miyuki Nakajima once wrote, 'Fight! Those who will not fight will probably laugh at the songs of those who fight.' Well, isn't it nice that they can laugh and you can fight?
Sincerely,
An old, dried up hag who loves her omelet rice"
Well, there you are.
Submitted November 21, 2016 at 03:53AM by RyanoftheStars http://ift.tt/2fScPty KotakuInAction
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