The horribly taken picture above is from that museum for Taiwanese history that I mentioned a few weeks ago. These two bricks are part of the debris caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If I have my facts straight, after the war Taiwan donated a lot of Japanese books to Japan. As the premier university in Taiwan started out as a Japanese school, they had a large amount of books that they donated to Japan. In return Japan gave them these two broken bricks.
While the bombing of Japan is something that I think pops into everybody's heads every now and then, there are two times in my life that I really thought about it deeply. Once was when i was a kid and first learned about it, the other was after i saw a movie by Akira Kurosawa (my favorite director) called Rhapsody in August. This film is about three generations of a Japanese family and how each generation was/is affected the the bombing. It's a mesmerizing film.
Especially memorable are the scenes which take place in modern day Nagasaki. It made me want to go there myself, but I always feel a bit guilty of my excitement to visit historical ruins, when I stop to consider what had to happen to make those ruins. But one great experience I've had in Taiwan is being able to speak with "real" Japanese people about their thoughts on the bombing and how the bombing affected their family and their lives. I think meeting these people on neutral ground of sorts (i.e. not america or japan) allows a much more freeing discussion.
