Shu Takeyama and the Atomic Bomb Part II – Blood Stains the Rising Sun

From the earliest moments of my childhood I was fascinated with war. Whether I was building a fort, recreating the glorious battles of old with plastic army men or simply daydreaming, I longed for the heroics of battle. The summers of my youth were spent in the jungles of our local creeks as we waged war with machetes and BB guns.

Where does this desire for battle come from? Is there something innate within my soul or are my collected experiences and surroundings responsible for embedding these images in my young mind?

One other memory from my youth, almost as powerful as that of war, was of the man Jesus of Nazareth. In childlike faith I remember trusting in him with a total abandonment that seems a complete impossibility for the man I now know myself to be. At age four I recall the fateful moment that my foothold gave way and I broke my arm while attempting to find my birthday present high atop my parents closet. In the midst of my agony and while desperately trying to avoid the doctor’s setting of my crooked arm I confidently assured him that I was not in need of his services that day –Jesus would heal me.

What strikes me now is how incompatible I find these powerful forces that were at work in the heart and mind of my youth. For almost fifteen years I lived with this apparent contradiction between the thirst for the glory of war and the love of a Palestinian Jew who lived some two thousand years ago.

I would like to be able to say that in studying the life of Jesus I came to understand what he meant be directing us to “love our enemies,” but it was rather a blood stained Japanese flag and Shu Takeyama that revealed to me the unconditional and liberating love Jesus had spoken of.

For many years the most treasured relic from my grandfather was a small blood-stained Japanese flag he removed from a fallen soldier. I never knew my grandfather. He died many years before I was born from an illness he contracted during the war. I suspect however that he knew something of the horror of war—things he would never share with his own children—things he would never want them to know.

Several years ago my grandmother revealed to my father some of what my grandfather endured during his time in the Philippines. While some men’s experience of the war was tempered by the distance modern weapons afford, my grandfather’s experience was like that of countless men. In foxholes and trenches my grandfather fought for his life in close combat with bayonet attached. Had he killed the man from whom he removed the flag? Did his bayonet, the one in my father’s dresser, draw the blood that decorates the symbol of the rising sun?

This past Christmas my father and I sorted through my grandfather’s military records and we found something quite surprising. It seems my grandfather had been awarded a Bronze Star for bravery in a combat zone. You may ask, what is so surprising about this discovery? The answer is simply that we never knew. Not only was it never displayed, but it was never found. I suspect that my grandfather’s silence and the absence of this 4th highest military award speaks deeply of his experience in war.

Perhaps in the midst of battle he came to understand what my friendship with Shu would reveal over four decades later. I don’t remember the day or the hour that Shu and I discovered that our grandfather’s had both fought in the Philippines, but I will never forget how the picture of the blood-stained flag raced through my mind and how an invisible bayonet pierced the violence in my own heart that day.

You see, in the not so distance past the very DNA that ran through Shu and I was poised to destroy one another in defense of American and Japanese nationalism.

Once again, it was the love of my friend, a man from another race that revealed to me what Jesus of Nazareth meant when he said “Love your enemies.”