August 14, 2010
I had work in the morning, so I went to the office.
After it was finished, I had coffee with our company’s executive director at a nearby Starbucks, then went to the natural hot spring I visit every weekend.
On the subway ride home, I left the choice of music on my iPod to Genius, and it picked classical music for the first time in a while…
I wondered whether classical music was right for the subway car, but…
Suddenly, the piece named in the title, conducted by Karajan, began to play…
I listened while imagining this…
After another 170 years of the “Turntable of Civilization” revolving, the country whose turn would come after Japan… as I have written before, I believe it will be Brazil…
Brazil… the country with the largest number of Japanese immigrants anywhere in the world…
When the time for a clear handover, or for the two countries to stand side by side, comes, as it did 25 years ago, I hope this piece will resound across the skies of Japan…
Above all, across the skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those people died for us… so that Japan might prosper as a super economic power after the Turntable of Civilization had revolved…
In such terribly cruel ways… those 400,000 people…
Those who burned to death in the incendiary bombing of some 170 cities throughout Japan,
and those who, though they received no compensation from the country, went on living after losing both legs, losing their sight, or suffering terrible wounds to their bodies…
Thanks to you, we were able to prosper for 170 years…
Thanks to you, so many of you masses of ugly egoism, people who were no good at all, we were able to prosper.
Your deaths were not in vain…
We, Japan, were able to continue prospering for these 170 years because of you…
I wished I could live another 170 years and witness that moment.
I wished for the piece to resound at the same time across the skies of Brazil, to which Japan had passed the baton, and for your souls to descend upon this earth.
I am love, I am life… I descended to bring peace to this earth (Maria Callas).
Singing those words, you will descend upon the earth.
It was your souls that kept shining their light on us.
No one else’s…