From Japanese woman author Kyoko Mori’s novel-One Bird
“Soldiers in Manchuria did not spare the people there. They killed women, children, old men and women. They burned down the villages. I can’t say that my brother never did anything wrong. He, too, might have killed someone’s sister, someone’s child or grandmother. At very least, he must have watched other soldiers kill defenseless people. He didn’t try to stop them. That doesn’t mean that he deserved to die. Still, it’s wrong to think of him as a hero. My parents insist that Susumu was just another victim of the war, like the people who died from the firebombs dropped in Kobe. But Susumu was a soldier. He went to the war, prepared not only to die but to kill. He was not like the firebomb victims, who were not soldiers, who never killed anyone. I wouldn’t be honoring my brother’s memory if I lied and made him out to be a hero or an innocent victim. Nobody is completely innocent in war- even those of us who stay at home and support it or don’t oppose it hard enough.”
