Japan Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: Hammering aluminum foil balls shiny?

It explains the how of the phenomenon, if not the why.

This spring, the Daughter was in the kitchen, took some aluminum foil, crumpled it up into a ball, and started hammering it until it became shiny.

For some of you “with it” folks, you would have understood what she was doing. My wife and I, on the other hand, were totally puzzled. Now the Daughter EXPECTED her mother NOT to know about what trendy things that going on in the world.

She was surprised and disappointed, though, that her father had no idea why she was pounding a foil ball. Because I was busy/tired, I didn’t even try to find out for well over a month.

One day while I was watching one of those four-minute vlogbrothers videos, there was, on the sidebar, a 2015 TEDx Indianapolis video Paper towns and why learning is awesome by vlogbrother/author John Green.

“Some of us learn best in the classroom and some of us … well, we don’t. But we still love to learn, to find out new things about the world and challenge our minds. We just need to find the right place to do it, and the right community to learn with.”

Somehow, it finally occurred to me that I could – [shock] – search “aluminum ball polishing” on YouTube. There are 17,300 videos, some with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of hits.

Mirror-Polished Japanese Foil Ball Challenge Crushed in a Hydraulic Press-What’s Inside? has over 18 million views. The article People in Japan Are Polishing Ordinary Aluminum Foil Balls Into Shiny Orbs explains the how of the phenomenon, if not the why. Still, I have learned something else new from my daughter. I’m not sure of its applicability.

Except that there’s something to be said for web searching. I don’t do it much without a specific purpose. Also, now that I DO know why the Daughter was hammering aluminum, I’m tentatively back in her good graces on the “cool dad” meter. It could change tomorrow, though, and it probably will.

J is for Japan, the US and World War II

The visit by Abe to Pearl Harbor comes after many years of debate in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere about how the two nations should come to terms with the legacy of World War II

I was thrilled by a pair of events addressing the historic Japan-United States enmity of the 1940s.

In May 2016, then-President Barack Obama visited Hiroshima, the first American commander-in-chief to do so since the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city over 70 years earlier.

While criticized by those on the left and the right, I thought it was an important gesture. “As he promised, the president did not apologize for the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which killed an estimated 215,000 people. He laid a wreath at Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima and embraced a 91-year-old survivor of the nuclear attack.”

During his 20-minute remarks, “Obama said, ‘Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder the terrible forces unleashed in the not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead … their souls speak to us and ask us to look inward. To take stock of who we are and what we might become.’

“In the Hiroshima museum’s guest book before his speech, the President wrote that he hoped the world will ‘find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.’‎” Most of the elderly survivors, I imagine, did not foresee an American President in their midst, in that place.

Then, in December 2016, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe offered his condolences for his country’s attack on Pearl Harbor. “‘We must never repeat the horrors of war again, this is the solemn vow the people of Japan have taken,” he said. The Prime Minister was accompanied by President Obama, making the visit the first by the leaders of both countries.

“Mr. Abe paid tribute to the [2,400] men who lost their lives in 1941 at the naval base, many of whom remain entombed in the wreckage of the USS Arizona, sunk by the Japanese that day, and vowed reconciliation and peace.

How did this come about?

“Just as was the case when Obama visited Hiroshima earlier in the year—as the first sitting U.S. President to go to the site of the atomic bombing—the visit by Abe comes after many years of debate in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere about how the two nations should come to terms with the legacy of World War II.”

Mr. Abe never actually apologized, but as one elderly Pearl Harbor survivor noted, the Prime Minister’s presence was even more important.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Dwight Eisenhower (1963): “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

My sixth-grade teacher, Paul Peca, who died four years ago, believed that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, was necessary in order to end World War II in the Pacific.

He said, and the conventional wisdom supported the claim, that the kamikaze fighters were doing severe damage to the Allied troops and that the war needed to end quickly.

Regardless, I was never convinced that the United States should be the first country to drop the bomb. The sheer devastation, not just immediately but in the aftermath, troubled me.

On this issue, I was affected greatly by two pieces from the arts. One was the 1983 documentary Atomic Cafe. “Disturbing collection of 1940s and 1950s United States government issued propaganda films designed to reassure Americans that the atomic bomb was not a threat to their safety.” It reviewed quite well.

You can watch Atomic Cafe at Snagfilms.com or Vimeo or Documentary Storm, or elsewhere. It also had a nifty soundtrack, which I have on vinyl, and you should seek out these songs.

The other item was Hadashi no Gen, or Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa, which “recounts the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a young boy, Gen, and his family. But the book’s themes (the physical and psychological damage ordinary people suffer from war’s realities) ring chillingly true today.”

“Leonard Rifas’ EduComics (together with World Color Press) published it [in 1976] as Gen of Hiroshima, the ‘first full-length translation of a manga from Japanese into English to be published in the West.’ It was unpopular, however, and the series was canceled after two volumes.” I have those two issues.

There was a 1983 film, which I have not seen; it is here, in Japanese.

Much more recently, I read The Real Reason America Dropped The Atomic Bomb. It Was Not To End The War.

Some salient sections:

Here’s what General/President Dwight Eisenhower had to say about it in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):

“Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.”

and

Here is a quote from Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Ellis Zacharias:

“Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia. Washington decided that Japan had been given its chance and now it was time to use the A-bomb. I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds.”

There’s a lot more well-documented information there. Here’s hoping, “Never again.”

The no-sex zone

The trouble with the virginity pledge is that while it may be an “effective means of delaying sexual intercourse initiation among those inclined to pledge…; pledging does not appear to affect sexual safety among pledgers who fail to remain abstinent.”

“According to a fascinating and bewildering investigation in the Guardian by Abigail Haworth Japanese young people are losing interest not just in marriage but in romantic relationships. “Some have even given up on sex. The national press is calling it sekkusu shinai shokogun, or celibacy syndrome.” This is, of course, having a terrible impact on the nation’s birth rate.

Reading this, naturally, the first thing I think of is the song Turning Japanese by the Vapors, which has the lines:
No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women
No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it’s dark
Everyone around me is a total stranger
Everyone avoids me like a cyclone Ranger

LISTEN to Turning Japanese HERE

“Songwriter David Fenton explains: ‘Turning Japanese is all the clichés about angst and youth and turning into something you didn’t expect to.'” He denies that it contains either the sexual or racial connotations to which it has been attributed. “It could have been (turning) Portuguese, Lebanese, anything that fitted with that phrase. It has nothing to do with the Japanese,” the guitar lick and the video image notwithstanding.

That story about the young Japanese came out around the same time as I noticed articles on Facebook from some Christian pastors suggesting that sex is not meant for enjoyment, but that one ought to read a book or see a movie if one wants to have fun.
It’s ironic that young Japanese have inadvertently adopted the credo of ministers half a world away. (Perhaps they should read this – WARNING: explicit – article about the joys of premarital sex.)

Of course, part of the argument against premarital sex, beyond the religious, has to do with an unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Even now, About half of the of the 6.7 million pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unplanned… and “women with incomes at or below the federal poverty line are five times more likely than those at the highest income levels to become pregnant by accident.”

When it comes to sex, ignorance is NOT bliss.

Infamy

I believe there is wisdom to be gained from the past, but specifically, what is it we are supposed to learn?

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

I wasn’t born yet, but I do remember the distinctive voice of FDR in his radio address, and I remember many of the words he spoke.

I was thinking about this around 9/11 this year. Of course, most Americans don’t remember Pearl Harbor, 70 years ago, directly anymore, as the population ages. But if we did, what lessons are we to glean now?

“Never forget” is the mantra after many significant disasters. But Japan, and for that matter, Germany, are our allies now; maybe that’s the new message.

Incidentally, of the 16,112,566 Americans who served in the armed forces during WWII, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimated in November 2011 that only 1,711,000 nationwide are still living, and a greater number die each year.

And, as the population ages, we will forget 9/11 too, maybe not any time soon, but eventually, in a few generations. I believe there is wisdom to be gained from the past, but specifically, what is it we are supposed to learn? I think about this regularly, yet have no tidy answers.