I Hate Doing This, But . . .

. . . every so often I glance at my bookshelf and I see a truly evil book.

It's all about the Nanking Massacre.

It's not the only book or movie I have about Japanese atrocities in World War II, but it's one of the more disturbing.

I have a hideous fascination about Japanese atrocities because I lived in Japan and some of my students (I taught English) were there. One guy had been slated to be a "suicide boat bomber." He was so tiny and old that I found it hard to believe, but he was supposed to get in a boat filled with explosives and bring it next to an American ship and explode it. Luckily, the war ended just before he was supposed to do that.

Another guy, some rich business executive, was a pilot. HE was supposed to become a kamikaze but somehow the brass realized he was too good a pilot to lose and he could train other kamikazes.

My ex-wife worked for a while as a "hostess" in a bar/lounge and she told me stories of groups of elderly Japanese men who would come there, smoke and drink and laugh about the brutalities they perpetrated during the war. She was all shook up.

Nothing has really changed in Japan. I'll bet they'd do it all over again.

My 8-year old half-Japanese son looked at the book I was reading and saw a picture of a newspaper article that was published in Japan at the time that proudly described a "killing competition" between two Japanese soldiers of how many Chinese they'd killed (101! and 103!)and said "That's Japanese, Daddy!" And I had a hard time explaining to him what the book was about.

"Someday, I'll tell you what the book is about, Tai-chan," I said. "Someday when you're much older."

The Nazis were bad, but the Japanese were orders of magnitude worse. And I will be among them seven days from now.

Pity me.