n the past few months I’ve taken up listening to audiobooks. They keep my mind awake when doing woodworking, editing photos or driving. I recently downloaded two, Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie and With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge.
You might not recognize these books, but they were the foundation for about three-quarters of the HBO miniseries The Pacific. With Tom Hanks as executive producer, that miniseries gave the Band of Brothers treatment to the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. It was one of the finest examples of historical television ever produced, in my eyes.
Last night I downloaded these two books so I would have something to listen to on the way to Regina. These days I am making regular trips to Regina, taking my daughter to her braces appointment. To make this more of an adventure than a chore, I told her we’re going to try to go to a different restaurant every time.
For the second visit in a row, we found ourselves in a sushi restaurant, thoroughly enjoying the exquisite cuisine. We don’t get to partake of raw fish often these days, since the short-lived (and expensive) sushi place four blocks from our house closed a few years ago.
As I sat there, sipping my miso soup, I glanced up at the woman who seemed to be supervising the whole shebang. She hovered at the entrance to the kitchen area as two men prepared sushi at the open sushi bar. I presumed they were all Japanese in origin.
How incongruous this scene was to the graphic detail I had been listening to just an hour before regarding the opening battles on Guadalcanal. (Don’t worry, Katrina was plugged into her iPad.)
The war in the Pacific was probably one of the most vicious this planet has ever seen, with the Japanese fighting to the last man in nearly every battle. They often sacrificed themselves in huge numbers in suicidal Bonsai charges, or flew into ships in Kamikaze attacks.
A close friend had a grandfather who was a Canadian veteran who was captured in Hong Kong and suffered as a POW for several years until the end of the war. Few words can describe how horribly POWs captured by the Japanese were treated, since their belief system was that death was preferable to surrender.
Yet here I was, 71 years later, eating at a Japanese restaurant, and probably not one person in the building had given a thought that day as to how much hatred there once had been between Japan and the Allies. They just ate their sushi as best they could and enjoyed their small talk with friends and colleagues.
In a similar manner, a trending show on Netflix right now is called Secrets of Great British Castles. It’s well worth a binge watch. But at the conclusion, one must realize that pretty much everyone in the British Isles had several hundred years of very good reasons to hate the English, including some of the English themselves. The most recent example in the series was Northern Ireland, where Carrickfergus Castle was used for hundreds of years to oppress the Catholics. It has only been in recent years that peace has come to Northern Ireland.
And that’s the whole point. If the Japanese and Americans (and by extension, Canadians), and all the assorted folks in the British Isles can come to peace, maybe, just maybe, there might be hope for some other parts of the world, too.
Like the Middle East, perhaps?
Food for thought. Pass the ginger.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
