I don’t usually write much about politics or world events on my blog because politics is exhausting. The effort to hold on to the comfortable belief that our leaders are not horrid people lasts for a while, but then that belief comes into direct conflict with the fact of the leaders doing something horrid. This is followed by propaganda which is followed by justification which is then followed by the belief that the horrid event was necessary and that the leaders are not really horrid people. This is the weary intellectual treadmill of modern politics.

We want to believe that the leaders of the world are not the thieving, grasping, psychopathic murderers that their actions show them to be, but are, in fact, the concerned, wise, and just statesmen that they pretend to be. But the whole round and round from happy political illusion to stark political reality and back to illusion again is exhausting in the long run, and is an effort best left to the young.

I prefer to write about life and laughs in Japan (and elsewhere), about the animals I know and the people I meet here in this land that is the farthest of the Far East. And now it’s August, but there are always two Augusts in Japan: There is the August of now, when by day the warm summer breezes skip along happily with you and the fresh white clouds tower high in the endless blue sky, when by night the air folds you close and warm, putting soft hands on your cheeks, resting them there while you listen to the long droning songs of the giant cicadas. And then there is the of August somber remembrance: when the Pacific War came to an end amid the double atomic bombings and the massive firestorm raids on Tokyo.

Studying these events in Modern History class in high school, I knew, at least intellectually, that these were momentous happenings: The atomic bombing of Hiroshima at 8:15am on August 6th, 1945, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki at 11:01am on August 9th, and the continuing firestorm raids on Tokyo where a single big raid could kill 100,000 people. We even learned the names of the atomic bombs: Little Boy and Fat Man. But none of it was very real to me; partly because nothing much that occurred beyond last week is real to a teenager, and partly because I’d never met anyone who had been involved in these great cataclysmic events. Indeed, how could you ever meet someone who was there at the atomic bombing? They’re all dead, right? Blown up.

Except that for the last twelve years I’ve been singing with and going to church with someone who was in downtown Nagasaki at 11:01am on August 9th, 1945.

He did not die in the bombing, obviously, and he sang the psalm every third Sunday or so when his name came up on the singing rota. He was a tenor. He did finally die, but that was only last month, and that’s how I found out about him and the atomic bomb, because of what people said about him at the funeral. Things he never said about himself and his life.

Mr Hiroshi Mori was born into an old Catholic family in Nagasaki in 1933. When his grandparents were young it was government policy to kill Christians outright, and that policy had been in place for about two and a half centuries.

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