2010-10-19
Today, I wrote only short pieces in between other things, but I felt quite tired… I said to our company’s senior managing director, “Let’s go for a walk,” and went outside with only my mobile phone.
From the direction of the theater adjoining the Hotel Hankyu International that I wrote about previously… the Umeda Koma Theater and so on… many elementary schoolchildren came walking in two lines… There is nothing quite as pleasant as a sight like this, of children, I thought as I walked.
The procession of schoolchildren had something of the chirping and twittering of sparrows and skylarks about it… I am someone whose heart is deeply captivated by birds… especially wild little birds, whether sparrows in the streets or sparrows in the greenery in front of buildings.
The reason the procession of elementary schoolchildren… each dressed as they pleased… created an indescribably peaceful atmosphere… was that the children were carefree… they had no hardships… though, of course, children should not have to endure hardships.
I continued my walk, thinking such things as… I had suffered even though I was a child, and that was why it had been so painful for me… For me, burdened with suffering… all the more so… school was heaven.
We turned back and decided to have coffee outside Starbucks.
Passage omitted.
I thought that it also lay in the fact that many of those who had been burned and charred by incendiary bombs, or by atomic bombs, or whose very forms had vanished in an instant, were children… and I wept.