gaijin cuisine

Today I reached a point in the third-year English text where I had to read a story out loud to the class about the bombing of Hiroshima. Standing in front of my students, reading a simple but painfully tragic story about the United States' atrocious act against Japanese civilians, I'm a confused jumble of emotions. As I read the sad description of a little girl and boy struggling to comfort each other as the sit beneath a tree slowly succumbing to a gruesome, painful death, my voice cracks a little and my eyes start to well up with tears. I feel an awkward urge to apologize to the class: to recognize the fact that, in this room, I am the sole representative of a people group who committed a horrible, contemptible act of violence against their people group. I want their forgiveness. And yet I know it's not the time and place and that an apology might not carry much weight when made by a person who wasn't even born until some forty years after the fact. Or maybe it would have value. Who knows? Regardless, I made no personal epilogue, simply read the questions for the corresponding true-false quiz, still a confusion of emotions, still desiring some form of absolution.