Neanderpundit

During the second world war, the Japanese were horrible enemies to be greatly feared. Frankly, the fact that such a small country stood a chance against the USA was amazing, in and of itself.

Concerned that Germany was working on the bomb, we had driven full-tilt towards the nuclear age, and by the time we had bent those U235 atoms to our will, we had more or less defeated Hitler.

Japan, on the other hand, was another thing altogether. The Japanese still believed in the near-divinity of their emperor, and were willing, for the most part, to fight until the bitter end. Thousands and thousands of US soldiers would die, and thousands more in POW camps would suffer needlessly.

So we dropped the bomb. In three days we caused devastation of a type never seen before on earth, and the people of Japan surrendered, uttlerly broken.

Then, we sent them the Marshall plan and W. Edwards Deming, and made them a world manufacturing power for nearly 50 years.

In the meantime, there was some animosity, and deservedly so. A lot of Americans are alive today who marched across Bataan. A lot of Japanese remember the radiation sickness of Hiroshima.

Those things are still there, and there are other cultural issues that form a perhaps unbridgeable gulf. For the most part, though. Japan and America are, if not friendly, at least cordial.

Eventually, though, we learned a lot about the Japanese. Yeah, some parts of their culture are really alien to us, but some parts are not.
The strongest evidence of this is the film industry- lots of Japanese films have been remade into excellent American films, even a spaghetti western or two.

More recently, Japanese game shows and even subtitled Japanese films have made it into American theaters, and I love them. I’m a particular fan of the Zatoichi movies, and I’m not the only one.

If, fifty or sixty years after we anihilated the Japanese, we can find common ground with them, even exist as separate and individual cultures, what will my grandchildren be learning about the Islamic world? what parts of their culture will endear us to them?
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Many years ago, my cousin bought a piece of bottomland along the Embarras river in southern Illinois.

It was abandoned at the time, he bought it on a tax sale, and got it for a song. He went in, sank a shallow well point with a sledgehammer and a ladder, and dug a septic and seepage bed. He borrowed a bulldozer and carved out a flat spot on a bluff overlooking the river, and dragged in an old mobile home.

I think the total cost was around $6000.00, not including his labor, for the whole shooting match, fourteen acres of arable land and about six wooded acres. The gravel for the driveway cost almost a thousand of that 6k.

I loved to visit my cousin, he was living my dream life. We’d sit on his front porch (actually several old skids nailed to tree stumps cut level with his trailer floor) and cast our lines directly into the river, catch fish, eat them for dinner. At night we’d shoot coyotes sniffing around his henhouse.

He never touched the farm, he had a neighbor who plowed, planted, harvested, and he got 1/3 of the crop, and never had to lift a finger. It was a good deal, he always had fresh sweet corn and a very small garden out behind the trailer provided as much fresh produce as he could eat. He had two big freezers which he filled with food he either caught, shot, or grew, and at any moment he could probably live for a year and never lift a finger.

The farm was beautiful. See, bottomland tends to be very fertile, southern illinois growing seasons long, and it was a rare summer he wasn’t able to get two full crops off the land. He was living pretty high on the hog, by my standards.

One spring I saw news footage of people being rescued by DNR boats off the embarras, and to my surprise, I saw as uniformed DNR officials and cops in an Evinrude tri-hull rescue my cousin off the roof of his almost submerged trailer.
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Back here I spoke of some of the perils of childhood. Specifically in relation to frogs.

Now, if you are a kid and you want to ride a bike, you have to have elbow pads, knee pads, a helmet, a pair of gloves, and an operating permit to sling your leg over the seat.

Back in the day, however, there were times when my alleged bicycle had pieces of plywood taped to c-clamps as a seat. Often, when sitting heavily back on this contraption, I wondered if impaling one of my buttocks on the bare metal tube would be less painful.

More to the point, there were a lot of circumstances where I made do with what was at hand, plaything wise. Oh, i had the normal contingency of refrigerator boxes, metal barrel hoops, and a quarter would buy you a solid pound of green army men, plastic so cheap and waxy you only had to sit them in the sun to bend them into innumerable (and often immoral) poses. I loved green army men, and at one point our driveway was paved with a combination of green army men and shingletab.

Long before the Shingletab went down, though, we had a gravel drive. Well, there was some gravel in it, anyway, though it still required regular mowing.

Dad finally managed to scrape together the scratch to lay down some gravel, and the guy came out with a bigass bomberfull, which turned out to be, rather than the crush&run we originally wanted, a bomberload of river gravel.

As a driveway, it was a dismal failure; as a source of entertainment for a 7 year old, it was pure heaven.

The river gravel was perfect slingshot fodder. I would search for specific flat stones and save them for skipping at the lake. And then, one day I saw the stones wet for the first time. We’d come home from mass in a late summer rain, and those stones, wet for the first time, were magically transformed- agates, quartzes, several different types of granite, the colors and the patterns were awesome.

Mom wasn’t by any means a neglectful parent, but I had a lot of freedom, for the day, I was just not allowed out in the rain. I also tended to get myself in trouble anytime I used the garden hose.

So on any given summer afternoon, sun blazing down on the indiana countryside, I could be found sitting cross-legged on the edge of the driveway, next to dad’s 1960 Ford Comet,

Licking rocks.

You see, you had to moisten them to make sure you were getting the really cool looking ones. I’d put them in a big pile and then sit them on the ledge outside my bedroom window so I could sit and stare at the cool colors on rainy summer afternoons.

I did this for more than a year, as I remember, then dad brought in a bomber of shingletab and changed the game forever.

I think it probably explains a few things.