At a Zen Buddhist temple in southern Japan, even the dog prays.
Mimicking his master, priest Joei Yoshikuni, a 1 1/2-year-old black-and-white Chihuahua named Conan joins in the daily prayers at Naha’s Shuri Kannondo temple, sitting up on his hind legs and putting his front paws together before the altar.
It took him only a few days to learn the motions, and now he is the talk of the town.
“Word has spread, and we are getting a lot more tourists,” Yoshikuni said Monday.
Yoshikuni said Conan generally goes through his prayer routine at the temple in the capital of Japan’s southern Okinawa prefecture without prompting before his morning and evening meals.
“I think he saw me doing it all the time and got the idea to do it, too,” Yoshikuni said.
The priest is now trying to teach him how to meditate.
Well, sort of.
“Basically, I am just trying to get him to sit still while I meditate.”
This 2007 Japanese movie is based on the story of a real family that was caught in the 2004 Niigata earthquake. The basic plot involves a family consisting of a father, grandfather, and a son and daughter; the mother died some years before. They live in a rural town. On their way home one day, the kids stumble upon an abandoned shiba inu puppy, and the little girl falls in love with her. At first, they avoid taking care of her and keep her far from home because their father is afraid of dogs.
Eventually, things work out and the dog is accepted into their home. Some time later, the pup, Mari, has grown into an adult and has three puppies of her own.
The the quake hits; the son is safe at school, the father survives the quake in town, but the daughter and grandfather are trapped under their collapsed home. Mari eventually runs off and finds some Jietai (Self-Defense Force, or Japanese military) rescue workers, who rescue the girl and her grandfather, but the dogs have to stay behind in the abandoned village.
Mari and Her Puppies
Three puppies were born on the day of an earthquake.
On the fateful morning of October 23, 2004, a dog named Mari gave birth to three puppies in Yamakoshi Village, Niigata Prefecture, Japan.
That evening, a severe earthquake struck Niigata and devastated the village, causing almost all of its homes to collapse, including the one where Mari lived.
During the quake the newborn puppies were jolted away from their mother, and since their eyes were still closed, they could not find their way back to her side. Also, because she was bound by a leash, Mari could not reach her babies. She tried repeatedly to pull free from the leash, but to no avail. Then, several tremors occurred and Mari tried even harder to break free until her neck began to bleed. Suddenly, another strong aftershock struck, Mari struggled with all her might, and the collar suddenly came loose. Next she quickly picked up her puppies, moved them to a safe place, and without taking a rest ran toward the ruins that were once her house.
Three qualities define a true shiba inu: Kan’i, Ryosei and Soboku.
Kan’i is translated as “spirited boldness” and means “well-balanced, courageous and self-confident”.
Ryosei (”good nature”) refers to the loyal and obedient character of the shiba and to her strong senses which make her an ideal home guardian.
Soboku refers to the natural beauty of the soul, meaning that a shiba is unaffected,cheerful and spontaneous.
Courageous rescue of the grandfather
The grandfather of Mari’s family was home alone that day.
He lived on the second floor, but suffered from a neurological disorder that made it impossible for him to stand on his feet or climb the stairs unassisted.
After the earthquake, the old man was immobilized as he had been trapped beneath a wardrobe. Aftershocks and the total darkness resulting from a power outage pushed him into desperately thinking that death might be around the corner.
Just then, Mari appeared in his room on the second floor and looked at him with encouraging eyes. The grandfather had been slipping into unconsciousness, but when he saw Mari he regained awareness although he was still immobilized. Mari then licked him to give him encouragement and went downstairs several times to check on her pups before quickly returning to the man’s room. She ran back and forth many times even though her paws had been injured by the sharp-edged glass and pieces of porcelain that lay all over the floor. Each trip gave her new wounds, but Mari managed to kindle new hope in the grandfather’s heart, and looking at Mari he thought “I must live on. I cannot give up.”
Finally, he pushed at the wardrobe with all his strength, it gave way and he managed to free himself. Then with Mari’s encouragement, the grandfather spent two hours climbing down the stairs - a feat he had previously been unable to accomplish without help. Upon reaching the ground floor, he was happy to find that the three puppies were safe and sound.
A sad parting and further ordeals
After the October 23, 2004 earthquake Yamakoshi Village was in a state of total destruction and isolation as all local roads had been cut off. And with a continuous series of aftershocks increasing the danger of landslides, on October 25 all the villagers were evacuated by helicopter to a nearby accommodation center.
Under these circumstances, the grandfather was forced to leave Mari behind, for in times of disaster saving human lives is the main concern. He left all of his pet food for his beloved dog, prayed that she and her pups would be safe and took off her collar. Then, with no other options, as he boarded the helicopter to leave behind the one who had saved his life, he said with guilt and sadness, “I’m very sorry, Mari,” and felt heart-broken as Mari howled in deep sorrow.
As time passed and her supply of rations ran out, Mari had to search for food in her abandoned village, suffering many ordeals as she tried to protect her little puppies. All the while the grandfather thought of her constantly, and with anxiety over the continuing tremors fell ill and had to be hospitalized.
Then two weeks after the evacuation, the villagers were allowed to return to Yamakoshi to see their homes. Among the returnees was the man’s son, who immediately began to search for Mari. Upon finding her, he noticed that she was much thinner, and she hesitated for an instant after hearing her name but then dashed toward him. He held her close in his arms for a long time.
Mari had not had enough food for herself, but she fed her babies milk and took care of them as well as she could. In contrast to their skinny mother, the three puppies looked chubby and healthy as they slept sweetly on the porch. The son was delighted to see the little pups growing up in good health.
Before Yamakoshi Village was reconstructed, the villagers remained in temporary housing in a neighboring city. Being in charge of advertising affairs for the village committee, the son was a busy man so he placed Mari and her puppies in the care of another family. When the grandfather was still in the hospital, Mari’s caretaker took her to visit him.Thus, after undergoing countless trials, Mari and the old man were finally reunited. Mari was very happy to see the man, who was recuperating and said with quivering lips and tears filling his eyes, “Thank you for saving my life.”
Then in April 2005 the grandfather was discharged from the hospital and began living with his son and Mari in an apartment. By that time Mari’s three puppies had been adopted by other families and were growing up healthily in their new homes. Today, the grandfather and his family are still living in the apartment but look forward to returning soon to Yamakoshi Village.
Fireworks for Mari
Mari’s touching story, which illustrates the mutual trust and love between humans and animals that helps them through ordeals, has frequently been reported in the news media and has also been adapted as an illustrated storybook - Mari of Yamakoshi Village and Her Three Pups. The book has received a huge response in Japan and serves as a great inspiration for disaster victims. The company that published the volume is contributing part of its sales revenues to the reconstruction and relief funds for areas affected by the October 2004 earthquake, and distributes the book free of charge to children in Yamakoshi Village and its thirteen neighboring cities.
On August 2, 2005, the villagers held a fireworks celebration in their city of refuge just as they do in their home town each year, and this year event was entitled “Fireworks for Mari.” While participating in the festivity they wished that Yamakoshi Village could be recovered as quickly as possible. Amid the dazzling light and smoke of the fireworks, Mari’s radiant smile seemed to fill the night sky, bringing hope and encouragement to the spectators.
Anyone who studies Hiroshima and the atomic bombing is likely to encounter the story of a girl named Sadako.
Sadako Sasaki experienced the atomic bombing at the age of two. Struck by leukemia ten years later, her short life ended. Sadako was one of the many children who suffered and died because of the atomic bomb.
On the morning of August 6, air-raid sirens sounded just after 7:00 a.m. After a while, the all-clear sounded, and people began to move about their daily lives again. Sadako, her grandmother, her mother, and brother Masahiro were eating breakfast together.
The walls of the house toppled, and Sadako and the others were thrown. Masahiro and grandmother were injured but, miraculously, Sadako and her mother were unharmed. Somehow, all escaped from the collapsed house and fled toward the river. Along the way, Sadako’s grandmother turned back to get something from the house. She was never seen again.
Someone helped the family into a small, decrepit boat to save them from the fires. Though only four at the time, Masahiro remembers desperately bailing water. While the family was on the boat, rain began to fall. The rain left black splotches on Sadako’s clothes.
The war ended. Gradually, buildings were erected and people returned to the city where the rumor had spread that “nothing will grow for 75 years.” The Sasaki family reopened their barbershop in the heart of Hiroshima.
Ten years after the atomic bombing, life returned to normal for Hiroshima City and its people. However, something was wrong with Sadako’s body.
Though an atomic bombing survivor, Sadako had a healthy, energetic child who never missed a day of elementary school due to illness. She was a gentle caretaker of her younger sister and brother. She loved singing and sports-in fact, Sadako could outrun anyone in her class.Soon after winning the relay on Field Day, there were signs that something was wrong with Sadako. She caught a cold and felt a stiffness in her neck. When the cold went away, the stiffness stayed. By early 1955, Sadako’s face looked swollen.
After undergoing various tests, the doctor told Shigeo in February, “Sadako has leukemia. She has a year left at the most.” Sadako was admitted to the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital.
In August, 1000 paper cranes folded by high school students in Nagoya were delivered to the patients in the hospital. Sadako’s room, too, was brightened by cellophane cranes folded in many colors.
Receiving those cranes and hearing the legend, “Fold 1000 paper cranes and your wish will come true,” Sadako began to fold paper cranes herself. She threw herself into the task, folding into each crane the desire: “Let me get well.”
On the morning of October 25, Sadako’s life finally ended. She was 12 years old. It was exactly a year since the her Bamboo class had won the relay on Field Day.
Sadako’s former Bamboo classmates began a movement to raise funds for a monument. Their call elicited a huge response that they had not anticipated. More than 3000 schools around Japan sent money and letters saying, “Please use this to help build the monument.” In January 1957, it was officially decided to build the Children’s Peace Monument in Peace Memorial Park. The statue was completed on Children’s Day ( 5 May ) in 1958, two years after Sadako Sasaki’s death.
Though Sadako and the other children who had passed away would not return, the inscription carved into the stone in front of the monument at least carried the hope, “Let no more children fall victim to an atomic bombing.”
This is our cry.
This is our prayer.
For building peace in the world.
The following afternoon, Shigematsu went to inspect the hatchery ponds. The aiko were coming along well, and in a shallow corner of the larger pond some water weed was growing. Shokichi had probably planted it there; he must have got it from the Benten pond at Shiroyama. Its oval, shiny green leaves dotted the surface of the water, and from their midst rose a slender stalk on which a small, dark purple flower was in bloom.
Shigematsu looked up. “If a rainbow appears over those hills now, a miracle will happen,” he prophesied to himself. “Let a rainbow appear - not a white one, but one of many hues - and Yasuko will be cured.”
A jabbing pain in the stomach forced me to seat myself on some stone steps, heedless of the thick layer of ash settled on them. It was a dry, powdery ash like buckwheat flour. Dabbing at it with my finger, I found I could draw scrolls and write letters in it. I wrote all kinds of things. I visualized the blackboard at school in my childhood, and started to draw the diagram for Pythagoras’ theorem, but gave up halfway. I turned around to see where I was, and found it was the front entrance of the city hall, littered now with pieces of charred timbers lying here, there and everywhere. It was a desolate sight: the outer wall, a tasteful shade of cream until only the other day, was burned to a grayish-brown, and all the window frames, not to speak of the windows themselves, were gone.
Just then, I was surprised to hear someone call my name: “Mr. Shizuma! Where are you going?”
It was Mr. Tashiro, an elderly technologist from the Ujina canning factory.
“I’m supposed to go to the Coal Control Corporation, but I’ve not the faintest idea where it is.”
“They’ve had it, the same as everybody else. I don’t even know where the employees have gone to. So I tried coming to the city hall.”
“So the upshot is that I’ve come to the city hall to complain,” Tashiro said. “But you know,” said Tashiro as we walked, “it puzzles me why an important place like a control corporation still hasn’t put up a notice saying where it’s moved to. There must be some explanation for it, don’t you think?”
Together with Tashiro, I obtained an interview with Lieutenant Sasatake of the Control Section and tried to get a ration of coal, but we were told that permission to broach the reserves of coal at Ujina was absolutely out of the question.
“Concerning coal, as I have said many times already,” he said, “we must hold a conference before we can come to any conclusion. Anyway, I have to ask my superiors. The question of transport, for one thing, involves various technical considerations. And we have to weigh your request against the requirements of other firms, too. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until we’ve held our conference.”
Kuroi Ame (Black Rain), by Masuji Ibuse, was hailed in Japan as the first true work of art to be inspired by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The title refers to the radioactive rain and fallout from the explosion.
Ibuse began serializing Black Rain in the magazine Shincho in January 1965. On the publication of the work, Ibuse received the Order of Cultural Merit, Japan’s highest honor to a writer.
On that morning - the morning of August 6 - the Service Corps of the Second Middle School in Hiroshima had been listening to an exhortatory address on Temma Bridge, or some other bridge in the west of the city, when the atomic bomb fell.
In that instant the boys were burned from head to foot, but the teacher in charge had got the whole party to sing, pianissimo, a patriotic song: “Lay Me Beneath the Waves.”
When they had finished, he gave the command “Dismiss!” and himself led the way in jumping into the river, which happened to be running high with the tide at the time. The whole party followed suit.
Image: Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea #24, 1962
Black Rain is based on contemporaneous diary and journal entries of the bombing. We follow the principal narrator Shigematsu, in the days after the destruction of his home, when the black rain begins to fall. Shigematsu begins re-writing his poignant journal of the events in the hope of finding a husband for his niece, Yasuko, who has been scarred by radiation sickness. Shigematsu, his wife Shigeko, and Yasuko reassure prospective husbands that Yasuko was not affected by the radiation, although she was under the black rain that followed the destruction. Shigematsu reads his wartime diary to understand his own life, and Yasuko gives up all hopes of marrying and falls ill with radiation sickness.
The talks on my niece Yasuko’s marriage, which were rapidly approaching an agreement, have quite suddenly been broken off by the Aonos - the young man’s family. Yasuko has begun to show symptoms of radiation sickness. Everything has fallen through. By now, it is neither possible nor necessary to go on pretending. Yasuko, it seems, has sent the young man a despairing letter saying she has started having symptoms. I wonder whether it was love for him that made her decide on this honest course? Or did she do it in despair, on the impulse of a moment?
Her sight has deteriorated rapidly, and she complains of a constant ringing in her ears. When she first told me about it, in the living room, there was a moment when the living room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.
Black Rain is never melodramatic.Sometimes his characters criticize the wartime government but otherwise Ibuse expresses his views at an everyday level. Subtly, Ibuse tempers horror with gentle humour. Alongside the horrifying wastes of the ruined city, he sets the gentle Japanese countryside with its unchanging people and traditions. Against the threat of universal destruction, he sets the small, unimportant - and hence infinitely touching - human things which triumph in the end. The narration alters between Kobatake, a rural hamlet some distance from Hiroshima, at a time several years after the end of the war, and Hiroshima itself in the days immediately after the bombing.
Shigematsu fastened this account away as an appendix to his “Journal of the Bombing.” Then, at Shigeko’s request, he set off for Kotaro’s place with rice dumplings for The Mass for Dead Insects. The lacquer box containing the dumplings was inside the metal wash-bowl in which Kotaro had brought the loach, and the whole was encased in a wrapping-cloth.
The Mass for Dead Insects was a rite performed on the day after the festival, when farmers would make rice dumplings as an offering to the souls of the deceased insects they had inadvertently trodden on as they worked in the fields. On the same day, custom also demanded that they should return any articles that they had on loan from their neighbours.
Image: Pamela Bannos, Perils of Time 1899/1999, 1999
The book’s microscopic view initially seems to avoid the larger political and moral questions that surely such an atrocity demands, but a more nuanced understanding soon dawns: these larger questions cannot be asked of any situation if one cannot comprehend simple human misery and pride.
Minamata is a small Japanese fishing town living in the shadow of the chemical factory of the Chisso Corporation. When the factory began dumping large amounts of mercury in the bay in 1956 thousands of people began to develop symptoms of mercury poisoning. Almost all the towns cats went insane, throwing themselves into the ocean. Birds fell out of the sky. Panic gripped the city. In time, thousands of people would die from the poisoning.
An aide mops the brow of Chisso’s president Shimada, after he performed the Japanese ritual of shame and apology: touching his forehead to the ground, at the close of a grueling day in court.
Eugene Smith’s portrait of Minamata is an impassioned tale of environmental destruction, corporate neglect, and social responsibility. Together with his half-Japanese wife Aileen, he chronicled the fight against the industrial state, the direct action protests, the court cases, the stories of the afflicted families. Smith’s achievement is remarkable as he was not a detached observer but an active participant in the story, his role both heroic and tragic. Measured by its social impact, his photobook, Minamata, is one of the most important pictorial documents in history.
William Eugene Smith took this photo, and together with the help of his wife and Ishikawa Takeshi, a local photographer, many other photos were taken of the effects of long term environmental industrial mercury poisoning on the local population.
Here, on the Japanese Island of Kyushu, we see an image of an outwardly healthy mother bathing her fetal-poisoned 16 year old daughter, Tomoko Uemura, grotesquely deformed, physically crippled and blind since birth due to environmental industrial mercury poisoning in the local Minamata, Japan, water supply.
This may well be the first environmental pollution photojournalism. Note also the invariable comparison to Michelangelo Buonarroti ’s Pietà.
William Eugene Smith, who was severely beaten by goons hired by the offending chemical company, also received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for “photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.”
At a Zen Buddhist temple in southern Japan, even the dog prays.
Anyone who studies Hiroshima and the atomic bombing is likely to encounter the story of a girl named Sadako.
Receiving those cranes and hearing the legend, “Fold 1000 paper cranes and your wish will come true,” Sadako began to fold paper cranes herself. She threw herself into the task, folding into each crane the desire: “Let me get well.”
“I’m supposed to go to the Coal Control Corporation, but I’ve not the faintest idea where it is.”
The talks on my niece Yasuko’s marriage, which were rapidly approaching an agreement, have quite suddenly been broken off by the Aonos - the young man’s family. Yasuko has begun to show symptoms of radiation sickness. Everything has fallen through. By now, it is neither possible nor necessary to go on pretending. Yasuko, it seems, has sent the young man a despairing letter saying she has started having symptoms. I wonder whether it was love for him that made her decide on this honest course? Or did she do it in despair, on the impulse of a moment?
