The Devil of Nanking

I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.

I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.

I noticed that in Tokyo people didn’t smell. It was funny. I couldn’t smell them, and they didn’t say very much: the trains were packed but it was quite silent, like being jammed into a carriage with a thousand shop-window mannequins.

Maybe that was the price of ignorance, I thought, looking at the naked vagrant. Maybe Japan had to pay for the ignorant things it did in Nanking. Because ignorance as I'd got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil.

Because ignorance, as I’d got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil.

Don’t ever try to change her,’ my mother said, before she died. ‘The tusks of an elephant will never grow out of a dog’s mouth. You know that.

Sometimes people forget to be sympathetic and instead they blame you for everything, even for the things you did when you had no idea they were wrong.

Maybe all truths are in us at birth. Maybe for years all we do is swim away from what we already know, and maybe only old age and death allow us to swim back, back to something that is pure, something unchanged by the act of surviving.

Maybe you’re never really aware of the ones who are looking out for you until they’re gone.

The past has transforming energy. The energy of wind or fire. We need to have respect for something so destructive. And you are asking to walk straight into it without a thought? It is a dangerous land. You have to be sure that you want to go ahead.

Turn your face to the sun, my boy. Remember that life is short. Always turn your face to the sun when you have the chance.

In that first year when MacArthur set up headquarters, the Japanese lived on sawdust and acorns, peanut shells and tea-leaves, pumpkin stalks and seeds. People starved to death in the streets.