Day 311 - ?

Dear Reader, 

Sometimes I don't know how to title my post until after I finish writing it.  How WAS my day?  Gee, I don't know, there were so many disparate parts of it. Painters came, physical plant people came, dry cleaners person came, the guy to measure the carpeting for the stairs came, and the guy fixing up the security stuff came.  It was pretty frazzling, especially with alarms being tested on and off for two hours or so.  Finally everyone left the house and I raced to the post office to mail both kids a rechargeable bank card.  Then we went to a very fine Indian restaurant and went home.  

I had to iron clothes for my husband today.  I bought a beautiful new ironing board cover hoping it would make ironing more pleasant.  It doesn't!  It wasn't wasted money, though, because it is really beautiful.  

I didn't get to call any doctors for appointments today.  I did research last night and decided on a general practitioner very near who gets great reviews.  

I still haven't weighed and my fingernails are back to being nubs again.  So, lesson learned ... don't let them grow past the tips of my fingers because that's when I start tearing on them.  

My husband leaves for a trip tomorrow morning.  I hope to be able to get a lot of work done on the house while he is gone.  And I purchased tickets for a trip to Tennessee to see my mom, kids, and friends, and to get a million Prolotherapy injections.  Yeah, me!  My shoulder will definitely be getting treated!  

I am going into the city by myself tomorrow for the first time.  A nice, older couple from Tennessee is in town staying at the Grand Hyatt, so I'm going to go in and spend some time with the wife.  She is very nice, but so very feminine and proper.  I feel like I have to really reign myself in around her because I'm a good bit more boisterous than she is, and I fear I will alarm her!  :-).  I wanted to stay home and just work, but my husband talked me into going and "having an adventure"!  Since adventures seem to come my way without any invitation, I doubt that tomorrow will be boring!  

I'm fairly distraught at the moment. You know that I read "Unbroken".  Well, I am now reading "Last Man Out" which is about the Japanese massacring horribly U.S. POWs by getting them to go into bomb shelters that had been dug into the ground, and then dousing them with gasoline and setting them on fire.  Then they systematically hunted down almost all of the men who escaped and bayoneted them and burned them.  One man saw six guards torturing one man they found by first stabbing him with their bayonets and then setting one foot on fire, and then the other, and then his hands, before they set his body on fire.  And not only did they do these things, but they howled with laughter while they did them.  People can't understand the "inhumanity of mankind", but I don't have any such problem.  I believe our sin nature inclines us toward sin and the Bushido culture these soldiers were brought up in made them especially inclined to terrible things.  Plus, I think they were, by this point, full of the devil, literally.  But not until they gave an inward consent.  The most revealing passages about this is given in the gospel of John.  It is at the last supper and Jesus says that the person to whom He gave the bread would betray Him. Then He handed it to Judas, who took it. Then it says that "at that moment the devil entered him."  I think that, by taking the bread, he was saying "yes, I will betray You" and thus saying yes to the devil to use him since it was the devil's goal from the beginning.  

So.  Anyway.  I was looking up whether or not Japan had ever apologized for their actions.  They have over the years, but they've also denied many things that they did.  I found one Japanese person talking about how they weren't taught about WW2 in history except very briefly, and nothing about the atrocities they committed.  It wasn't till he got older and the internet became available that he learned more.  

I then came across in one of their apologies a reference to "the comfort women".  I looked that I and it turns out they abducted some 200,000 women, Chinese, Korean, Philipino, and Dutch, etc, and forced them to become prostitutes for the troops, which meant being raped, beaten, and tortured day and night.  75% of them died.  The remaining ones were so ashamed and traumatized that they didn't tell anyone what had happened to them when they were finally rescued.  Plus, the Japanese told them they would kill them and their families if they told anyone.  It's only been fairly recently that these women have begun to tell their story.  

In looking up one of these books, "Fifty Years of Silence," I came across more information about what the Japanese did to Nanking, the city that was the Capitol of China.  They then systematically went about killing 300,000 men, women, and children.  

We know about the genocides in Africa and other place.  But I don't think any of them have equalled this number of victims.  But most of us know nothing at all about Nanking and what happened there!  And, again, I found that it was because of the Cold War and the threat of communism that the West just wrote all of these things out of the history books!!  It's appalling!

Well, my arm is starting to hurt pretty bad again and I need to be getting to sleep.  It's 11:40 now and I almost feel like I could go to sleep right now!  

You know what's ironic?  We have had movies for decades casting Germans and Nazis as the evil bad guys.  Now, Hollywood has started casting Koreans as the bad guys.  What happened to the Japanese?  How have they missed getting to be Hollywood villains when it begins to look like they were the most horrific villains of all?  I mean, this Nanking massacre alone was 300,000 civilians.  That beats the number of people killed by the two atom bombs combined!   This is an interesting piece about the major massacres the Japanese committed:http://www.cnd.org/mirror/nanjing/NMNJ.html

I tried briefly to find figures on how many civilians the Japanese killed during the war, but couldn't.  But I did find one figure putting the number at 24,000,000; almost twice the number of people killed by Germany.  

What is going on??!  I wouldn't have thought that this level of distortion of history would have been possible in a country with a "free press"!  I am soooo very glad that Spielberg is making a major motion picture on this book, Unbroken, because hopefully it will open this up to the public more.  

Anyway.  I guess that's enough theology and history for the evening, and I shall bid you adieu!

Lisa