Originally published on August 8, 2007
The 21st annual “Lanterns of Remembrance, Lanterns of Hope” was held at Lake Lauderdale on the evening of August 2. Scheduled close to the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only wartime use of atomic weapons, this solemn event honored victims of armed conflicts throughout the world.
Over 100 peace activists from the region met in the picnic pavilion at the park to assemble floating lanterns, share a potluck dinner, and listen to a series of readings on non-violence. Interspersed throughout the program was music from Lynne and Richie Bittner, Ferrilyn Sourdiffe, Stephen Alcorn and Shantia Mayer. Particularly striking was an original arrangement of “America The Beautiful” by Ms. Sourdiffe and Mr. Alcorn.
As darkness began to fall, the “peacemakers” slowly walked to the lake’s edge, following flutist Bliss McIntosh and four members of the Mettawee Players who carried large winged puppets. After lighting the paper-enclosed lanterns, participants gently placed them on the surface of Lake Lauderdale. Those present silently watched the lanterns drift out to the center of the lake. Many stood arm-in-arm, remembering loved ones now gone. The only sounds were the occasional squeals of young children, giving voice to those children all over the world whose lives have been lost or shattered due to war.
Constructing a Lantern
Mettawee Players
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September 10, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Terry J. Ball
Instead of engaging in some sort of group guilt trip about using the bomb to end WWII, why not take a few moments to remember the real victims of the war agaisnt Japan. To name a few:
1. The Comfort women. Thousands of women taken prisoners by the Japanese and enslaved as prostitutes for the japanese military.
2. The Rape of Nanking. Following the fal of nanking Japanese soldiers wehnt on a rampage. In the following six weeks, the Nanking Red Cross units alone, buried around 43,000 bodies. About 20,000 women and girls had been raped, most were then murdered. Department stores, shops, churches and houses were set on fire while drunken soldiers indulged in wholesale looting and bayoneting of Chinese civilians for sport. It is estimated that around 200,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were killed in this, the most infamous atrocity committed by the Japanese army.
3. The Pig Basket Atrocity. When the Allies capitulated to the Japanese in East Java in 1942, around two hundred Allied soldiers took to the hills around Malang and formed themselves into groups of resistance fighters. Eventually they were rounded up by the Kempetai. The captured soldiers were squeezed into three feet long bamboo pig baskets and transported in open lorries, under a broiling 38 degree sun, to a rail siding and then transferred in open railway goods wagons to the coast. Half dead from thirst and cramp, the captives were carried on board waiting boats which then sailed out to the shark infested waters off the coast of Surabaya. There, the unfortunate prisoners, still enclosed in their bamboo cages, were thrown overboard to the waiting man-eaters. The commander in chief of Japanese forces in Java, General Imamura, was later acquitted of this atrocity in a Netherlands court for lack of evidence.
4. PHILIPPINES MASSACRE. A full account of all massacres of Filipinos by Japanese troops would fill several books. In Manila, 800 men women and children were machine-gunned in the grounds of St.Paul’s College. In the town of Calamba, 2,500 were shot or bayoneted. Around 100 were bayoneted and shot inside a church at Ponson and 169 villagers of Matina Pangi were rounded up and shot in cold blood. At the War Crimes Trial in Tokyo, document No 2726 consisted of 14,618 pages of sworn affidavits, each describing separate atrocities committed by the invading Japanese troops. The Tribunal listed 72 large scale massacres and 131,028 murders as a bare minimum.
R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, states that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. According to Rummel, in China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations and 10.2 millions in the course of the war.[12]
The list of massacres at the hands of the Japanese is almost endless. You should weep for these innocents rather than to wring your hands in “mock horror” at H.S. Truman’s brave decision to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of american soldiers that would have most probably died invading the Japanese mainland to put an end to these horrors.