[Hebrews 11:6]

First, thank you for your generosity in spending so much of your time educating us about the Japanese. Several besides Homer have also gone above and beyond in their contributions (henkster, EternalVigilance, BroJoeK, Peter Principle, et al), and you have certainly joined them despite your belated entrance.

Second, thank you for drawing such a clear contrast between the Japanese mindset and the Judeo-Christian. As I expressed previously, it's difficult for me to climb out of my skin to realize how others (Japanese, ISIS, Muslims, liberals, agnostics/atheists, etc., etc.) view the world, yet you have taken extra care to vividly and convincingly portray not only the fact of their worldview but also its origin and implications.

[henkster]

I’ll second that. The part about enlightening us about the Japanese mind-set, anyway.

chajin, we wish you had been here back in 1941...I mean 2011.

[chajin]

A memory came to me today as I was running errands around town. I was in my home in Japan: I was thinking that it would have to have been the summer of 1968, because we moved into the home the summer of '67, I had a summer job on the base in '69, and by the summer of '70 we were back in the states. Somehow the Japanese had obtained the original B&W footage of the aftermath of the atomic bombings, and at least one channel ran the footage, which took hours to view. I remember sitting on the wooden floor in front of the TV, glued to the screen, transfixed by the devastation that I was seeing.

So when I returned home I thought I would see what could be found on the internet. From an article posted in The Nation, which can be found here: "...in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, discovered a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the US had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return."

This must have been the footage that I was watching. It is available from the National Archives, and can be viewed here. It is 2'40" long. My memory tells me there was more footage than that being shown on the Japanese TV channel, which may or may not have been the case.