What a moving and touching story, thank you so much for posting.
So very much pain remains after all this time....it’s evident in so many posts here. There is so much pain in this thread that I haven’t been able to bring myself to respond to every post, as I always ‘try’ to do in other threads. The pain here is too great, and I hope that posters whom I haven’t replied to don’t feel offended.
I am thinking that perhaps one reason why there hasn’t been any sort of ‘national apology’ for these barbaric acts from Japan is that even after all of this time, most Japanese people honestly do not know the extent of these horrors. They have likely been shielded from knowledge of them by generation after generation who didn’t want their exalted grandfathers to ‘lose face’ in history.
Having never been to Japan, this is only my guess based upon reading, but it seems to me that it would be one possible logical explanation. The specter of having to contend with ‘loss of face’ over their defeat in WW2 would be magnified exponentially by coming to terms, on a national / cultural level, with a true, unvarnished and complete understanding that their own fathers and grandfathers joyfully engaged in such depraved inhumanity.
By suggesting this, I don’t by any means intend to say that it excuses them; quite the contrary.
Particularly considering the ease by which so much of this information is available nowadays, for an entire culture to wilfully turn it’s back upon it’s own horrific transgressions against all of humanity makes them far less than an honorable and virtuous culture and nation.
But I don’t think that Japan is alone.....has Russia issued a “national apology” for the gulags and the millions who died under Stalin? Have they tried to make amends, paltry as any effort would be?
Although I think that it’s wonderful and commendable that many are able to forgive these evils from within the context of Christianity or Judaism, this, I think, addresses the place that the Christian or the Jew occupies in the view of God. It does not, however, address the place that the Japanese or the Russians occupy with God, and my hope is that all guilty parties will one day be called to answer for what they have done, as well as their failure to come to terms with what they have failed to acknowledge to their fellow man while on Earth.
I believe you can be sure of that.
I have to believe that if God is omniscient, just, and fair, and he is, he will mete out much more severe punishment in the spiritual phase of life that I believe follows this physical phase of life to those unrepentant sinners who cruelly tortured and killed helpless victims here on planet earth than to unrepentant souls who sinned as all men have sinned, but did not commit such horrendous crimes against humanity.
It appears to us now that the WWII Japanese torturers, Nazi death camp fiends, Stalinist Russians, wicked religious inquisitors, and all other human monsters who down through history have tortured and killed helpless men, women, and children got away with their horrible atrocities scot free, but the last chapter in their book of life has not yet been opened and read. God's mill grinds slowly, but it grinds exceedingly fine.