In wartime, the vulnerable suffer the most

They don’t know war, and they don’t know the fear of losing their lives, and yet they are intrepid. I am describing the “militarist boys without knowledge of war,” who are rife in Japan these days.

Politicians are trying to turn Japan into a country that can wage war by agitating the public and deciding to lift Japan’s self-imposed ban on the right to exercise collective self-defense.

I wonder if people like myself, who have firsthand experience of war, are the only ones being disquieted by a premonition and a sense of crisis that we may be heading toward the return of a dark age.

Born and raised in Kobe, I ran about under the great air raids of Kobe that leveled the city. I barely survived, but a neighborhood woman perished during one of those attacks, precisely in the spot I normally would have been.

That painful experience is at the root of my life...