Today I worked on the assignment for the therapy course. The topic given was what I could not speak up in younger days. One event popped up in my mind.
My first visit to America was that I participated a packed tour when I was 20 years old. The tour company arranged a host family for each participant and we stayed with them for one month. There was one white man who was our guide and English teacher. I got along with him. He was a retired military in his late 60s. After the tour, he and I continued keeping in touch via an airmail.
When I was 27 years old, I went to America to visit him. He purchased a new house and was living with his daughter and her husband.
At the first impression, I could tell the teacher was happy to see me again. His daughter didn’t express any of her feeling to me. She was not interested in me. As for her husband, I could instantly tell that he didn’t like me staying at their house. This man didn’t have a joy and stayed at home all the time. All he did was just drinking beers all day every day. He looked like depressed.
I tried to avoid him as much as I could. But one afternoon, while the old man was taking a nap, he approached me and yelled at me. He mentioned about the Attack on Pearl Harbor and insisted that I should apologize him on behalf of my ancestors. I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t believe what I was taught in the social studies class at school. I told him I cannot do so because I don’t know the truth. My apology without knowing the truth will be discourteous for my ancestors. The man got furious. Then the old man, the English teacher, woke up from his nap and joined our conversation. His daughter came back from work and joined our conversation too. To my surprise, the two people took the drunken guy’s side and begged me to apologize on behalf of Japanese. So, I decided to leave their house on the next morning. Their house was in Idaho. I reserved a domestic airline ticket to Los Angeles. I didn’t have any friends or acquaintances there, but I wanted to leave from them as soon as possible.
When I arrived at the Los Angeles airport, I went to the pay phone booth and looked for a reasonable hotel and reserved it over the phone. I also reserved the hotel’s shuttle bus service to pick me up at the airport. The driver of the shuttle bus was a Japanese boy who was around my age. We became friends, and later he became my boyfriend. He told me the truth about the WW2 including the true reasons why Japan needed to start a war and that Japan did send a declaration of war before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He praised me of my reaction at the teacher’s house. I was lucky to have met the boy who knew the truth. At that time there were not many people who knew the truth, because it was well hidden.
Now the great news is that 25 years later, people started knowing the truth. The other day my daughter told me about the discussion at the social study class. I was happy to know that there were some students who mentioned about the truth that was hidden at that time. We are on the right track to know the truth and take the right actions.
three wisdom 