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[lobosolo]

About a year ago, Mary announced that for her 65th birthday present she wanted something special: a trip to Japan in springtime to see the cherry blossom. So what could I do but agree? We started looking for a package tour. I didn't think it was feasible to organise a trip there on our own (seeing as how neither of us speaks a word of Japanese),

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[a_trick_mind]

Thanks for posting the photos. The cherry blossoms make me want to be back in DC or in Kyoto. Excellent photo of you at dinner.

[lobosolo]

One thing I meant to mention was how unfailingly friendly, helpful and cheerful we found everyone in Japan. Everywhere we went, people would invariably go out of their way to help us order a dish off an incomprehensible (to us) menu, or show us how to buy subway tickets or something of the sort. We were embarrassed to think that Japanese tourists in London and other Western cities probably aren't treated anything like as courteously.

It may sound ungrateful or even racist to say this, but every time a young person showed us a kindness in this way, I couldn't help but wonder if his grandfather had been a brutal prison camp guard in WWII. When I was young, I knew people who had suffered appalling cruelty as prisoners of war in the Far East, so much so that they could not bear the sight of a Japanese face. Yet Japan today seems to me to be the model of a caring and humane civilisation, far more so than our own countries.

[a_trick_mind]

When we were on Guam, site of much Japanese cruelty in WWII, and current Japanese honeymoon favorite, we heard some of the older Guamanians sing a song about the Japanese. I don't really remember the lyrics, but in part they went, "What the Japs couldn't win with bombs and guns, they buy with money by the tons." Apparently all is not forgiven.

[lobosolo]

I remember as a teenager reading about some of the horrible tortures that the Japanese inflicted on their prisoners, such as simulated drowning. But times change. That practice has been given the jolly name of "waterboarding", as though it were some kind of a sport (like surfboarding or snowboarding), and Donald Rumsfeld has authorised it as an "admissible interrogation technique".

[a_trick_mind]

Fortunately Rumsfeld is no longer in charge of anything. I trust it will stay that way.