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Kingsland News October 2015 Dear Parishioners, Nick and I have now returned from Japan and are finding it difficult to adjust to British Summer Time. We have experienced laughter and tears, holiday and ceremony, history and present. A time for war and a time for peace says the writer of Ecclesiastes in that famous piece of wisdom writing in the Old Testament. We went to Nagasaki, the only place in Japan where trade was allowed with foreign countries in times gone by, the place of Ground Zero and living with the 70 year old history of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, of the 70,000 who died on that day, the place that has campaigned against nuclear weapons and war ever since. A group of volunteers in Japan started researching into those who were held prisoner of war and there was a move to erect a monument to those who died whilst there. An article went into the Telegraph asking for relatives of prisoners of war who were held in Fukuoka No 2 camp to make contact. Nick’s grandad was one of those and so we did. The camp had Dutch, British, American and Australian servicemen and there were representatives from each
country including Mr Klein a 90 year old Dutchman who was still alive and spoke at the ceremony about that time! He had been 17 at the time of internment and still in training. The amazing thing about something like this is that you get under the surface of family experience to those times that are not often talked about, times of pain and testing, of being wronged and acknowledging feelings that you don’t want to feel. Times like this are also times of mending as you hear the stories of others and piece together the pieces of the whole and it was that as well. Many stories to tell and I will tell you one today – a Dutchman whose father had been in the camp told how his Father had said that in his 4 years as prisoner of war he never bowed to the Japanese. Bowing is a form of greeting and a courtesy and his father never bowed during his time there. The son went to Japan about 10 years ago to try and find out where his father had been and said that he had bowed to the Japanese while he was there as a matter of course and felt really bad about doing that after all his father had said. But at the end of our time in Japan, with all the work that had been done by volunteers to bring together this group, and by erecting a