I worked early today. As you might already have known, today is a national anniversary for us, the Japanese. One question: how can I stop any war forever? After today's work, I went to the library in this town and borrowed Sebald's "Austerlitz" which tells me about how we can keep on memorizing any traumatic things in each one's mind (yes, including the wars, especially the holocaust). After that, I returned to my group home and had dinner.
When I was a teenager, I was a diligent (and too fanatic) leftist who believed other classmates must be simply idiots because no one seemed to me to try to discuss politics or any "profound" issues in the school. Of course, you would say to me that I must have been too simple to understand other classmates' issues. Yes, NOW I can see that. However, you should imagine how this world could have been without any internet (at least, at that period there was never any internet as such a useful infrastructure for us). It seemed to me that no one wanted to welcome any serious discussion in communities as daily chitchatting.
From another perspective, I can say that I had already been too autistic to obey (or be soaked into) the outer atmosphere in the classroom. Therefore, I can remember that I literally "shut out" any outer voices by using my earphones and tried to escape into my territory (I had already been a sort of fanatic Haruki fan). Writing this, I feel how I had been too "exclusive" and even "extreme" to observe the outer world calmly enough to learn from that.
However, about this I have to "beg" you this: When I was a teenager, already I had to "survive" a sort of conflict in that classroom. You would say I am exaggerating my tiny story too much (and I accept that because it must be from my memories only with no evidence), but at least from my viewpoint everything in that classroom could have been just a terrible hell-like joke or nightmare. Even though that classroom worked for me as a "textbook" to think about how our life can be "political".
