5 Dead In Tokyo Plane Collision. 48 Dead In Earthquake. South Korean Opposition Leader Knifed In Jugular
"Plane bursts into flames while landing at airport in Tokyo." That was the first headline I read Tuesday morning.
The second was "South Korean opposition leader stabbed in neck."
The third told of four-dozen dead in Japan, not from the burning plane, but rather from Monday's massive earthquake.
People died in the Tokyo airport incident too. Five, to be exact. Although everyone on the burning Japan Airlines flight was safely evacuated (a miracle, seemingly), all but one of the crew members o
I’m not sure if it’s intentional but your musings have taken on a Vonnegut approach recently. As a lover of his work, I like the approach. He certainly knew how to make light of the awful without seeming tone deaf.
Simply put: The content was becoming too dry and my responses to comments too delicate. While that might’ve appeased some readers, or been otherwise agreeable, I didn’t start writing for public consumption in 2016 so that I could walk on eggshells, and more importantly, I didn’t build a following by walking on eggshells either. So I’m taking it back to the basics a little bit in 2024.
I mean, don’t get me wrong: If you have a technical question about a subscription or a t-shirt order or something on the business side of the site, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing, no matter how important, and help you out immediately, and I’ll be the friendliest, most agreeable person on the planet. But that’s the administrative side of the site. The editorial has to be separate.
One of the more interesting bits of my personal history: in the 90s, I did a college year abroad in Japan. I did a home-stay, and hit the jackpot. The family owned a construction company and were quite wealthy. They just loved their culture and wanted to share it with the world, so I got to travel to all kinds of interesting tourist hot spots while staying in luxury hotels and dining at 4-star restaurants.
The host parents were 8 and 3 years old when the bombs were dropped. They were from Hiroshima. I don’t know where they were the day the bombs were dropped–I never worked up the courage to ask. There’s no way they didn’t lose friends and family on that fateful day, but somehow 50 years later, they were happy to spend their money hosting an American college student, squiring him about the country so he could enjoy one of the best years of his life at their expense.
The Japanese are truly an exceptional people, and their willingness to accept the seeming necessity and forgive the horror of seeing two of their cities nuked really is remarkable.
As soon as the fires were out, from his post on Guam, my dad was deployed to Hiroshima to photograph the destruction for the navy. He was there for a significant time and why he wasn’t made ill by the fallout I’ll never know. What was even more remarkable about the Japanese was that as soon as they signed the armistice, the became governed by the American general that took the Emperor’s sword. Even so, from the beginning the defeated people began to rebuild, create a new economy and by the 1990s, become an economic powerhouse. Everything I know about these people is fascinating to me. They own lunch.