At the YMCA they turn on closed captioning on the TVs so that people can watch one of the four screens since there is no mechanism to listen to them. In another case of hard hitting journalism, CNN had a story on about the final days of Michael Jackson and someone was talking about an extreme amount of antiseptic, except the closed captioning translated it as:

“Such an extreme amount of antisemitism could only be administered intravenously“

• • Spaghetti Squash. It may have been the variety I had, but this squash seemed particularly vulnerable to the ‘wilting’ disease. The vines produced few fruits, which I myself do not find appetizing.

• • Japanese Eggplants. This variety is supposedly more suitable to our climate and features an edible skin that isn’t plant leather; however, it’s quite finicky and seemed to take every moment to bitch in it’s own plant way whenever something changed. Two things really turned me off of this variety. First, every plant wilted horribly when transplanted from peat to soil, but unlike every other plant, they also wilted just as bad when the peat was just put directly into soil. Secondly, they wilted immediately when their pot was put into the ground. Why? Did the temperature change five friggin degrees? The jury is still out of fruit production, but the way these things are I don’t know if they’ll last long enough to produce any.

• • Cilantro. This spice has given me sketchy germination, which stinks all the more since it requires quite a bit of it to make any Mexican dishes; and a giant bunch of it is 80 cents down at the Indian market, so why bother.

• • Okra. This plant grew great, especially given the late start I gave it. However, the fruit require constant supervision as they would routinely grow from ‘too small to eat’ to ‘wood pulp’ huge in the matter of a day or two. As well, like cilantro it just takes too much okra to make a dish so I’d have to reserve a whole plot for it, but I just don’t like okra that much. It’s too easy to buy a big block of it frozen.

• • Pumpkins. Takes up too much room for something that is largely inedible. Although less so than the spaghetti squash, I was sweating that a season worth of growing was going to go nowhere due to the wilting and squash fungus diseases that the pumpkins were susceptible to.

• • Beans. I might still try to make them work, but it takes a bit too much effort to harvest them, and too many have to be grown for meaningful use.

• • Spinach. Bolts (goes to seed) way too quick

• Summer Squash. Yuck.

Winners:

• • Acorn Squash. The winner of the winter squash round up. Small size, great taste, nice tasting seeds too. If this plant has one fault, it’s that it’s imperviousness to the regular squash diseases meant a bumper crop of squashes, far more than I’d care to eat over a five year span, let alone a season.

• • Zucchini. It never got the wilting disease despite sharing space with other sick plants, and although it got the powerdry mildew-fungus stuff that seemingly all squash plants get, it sluffed it off and kept producing tons of great zukes. I’ve planted two this season in full sun, and that will be zuke enough (even with one we had to give them away at times!)

• • Pepper plants. They never seem to be a good price, so it was great to go out and find peppers on the plants. The grew great despite being started late.

• • Peas. Fresh peas taste great, and the plants this season didn’t even care about an occasional frost.

• • Basil. Slow to germinate, but quick to grow, this spice is great to have on hand for Italian dishes or, since I grew the Asian variety as well, fried rice. (The only caveat I present is that some of the seeds seemed to be ‘off hybrid’ or something since some of the plants smelled and tasted like basil, but didn’t really look like it).

• • ‘American’ Eggplants. These traditional eggplant plants grew in hardly any soil and sported great production. The only issue was finding sufficient dishes to use them in.

• Tomatoes. Last year I grew seventy tomato plants and netted a ton (figuratively, barely) of tomatoes. This year I’m down to two dozen and the plants have yet again shown great resiliency at being transplanted, over-watered, under-watered, cooked, frozen, etc.

Indifferent:

• Root Veggies. Onions, turnips and, potatoes aren’t all that hard to grow, but they take forever to do so

Okee-Dookee. Our first destination that would probably be of interest to outside interests was Hiroshima. I had a desire to visit there when I found out it wasn’t too terribly far from Tokushima. When I tried to suggest it, I learned that it was already a planned destination. In hindsight, though, I don’t know if it was scheduled primarily for a historical visit, or for food and fun. I’ll start with the heavy issues, but whenever I hear the name Hiroshima from now on, I’ll think of the lighter things it has to offer. It isn’t fair that a city that has so much to offer gets pigeon holed as ‘that nuked city’.

The Hiroshima A-bomb Dome

Although Mr. Kendall was well familiar with the Hiroshima Dome, I hadn’t heard of it until I did some web searching prior to our visit. It’s rather heavy (spiritually), with the rubble still in the same place on the ground from where the bomb had blown it free. Understandably, it’s seen a lot of reinforcement operations to keep it standing in its familiar state. A huge (especially for Japan) tract of land is set aside where there’s a rather large park and the extremely affordable Peace Museum.

The eternal flame. The museum is at the end of the walk.

Inside the Peace Museum is where the rubber hits the road as far as the Japanese perspective on this historical event. The museum had a cool audio device that would give the English (or a dozen other languages) language translations of the presentations. Needless to say, listening to America bashing and left wing gobbledygook got old real quick, and the thing hung dead around my neck through most of the museum walk through.

Although there weren’t any blatant lies, there seemed to be several sins of omission. Primarily, it seemed as if the U.S. decision to use the bomb was made in a vacuum. Much was made of the secret Hyde Park agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt, but it failed to point out various reasons for such a decision then, and its later irrelevance when Roosevelt was dead at the time when the decision to drop the bomb was made. I may not have been paying attention, but not one battle was mentioned in the lead up to the bombing, and much was made of Japan’s (apparent) weakness at the time.

My buddy mentioned that much arm twisting had gotten the Japanese to acknowledge the Korean and Chinese forced laborers who died in the bombing. Of course, either by poor translation or intentional sloppiness, one would get the impression that the evil Americans had killed these innocent slaves who happened to find themselves working in Japan.

There was also the B.S. quip towards the end about how wars never solve anything, etc.

The only problem with all this is, I can’t heavily fault the Japanese for the tone of the museum. The war certainly didn’t solve anything for the people who were burned to charcoal on the streets of Hiroshima. Sure the Japanese could admit that they were more nasty than they let on, but in their mind, it’s irrelevant to the issue at hand. I’m sure the question they’d pose is “How much less nasty could we have been to avoid such a fate?” This, of course, gets into the various reasons for the war to begin with.

Before

After
As well, I got an uneasy feeling at the museum. The mantra told to me in school was that more people died in the firebombing campaigns of WW2, but as my buddy pointed out this was one bomb, and a nasty one at that. Also taught to me in school, were the various good things brought about the bombing, especially the saved American and Japanese lives. However, such facts could be used as a justification for any horrible weapon. The American military could have just as easily dropped chemical weapons on population centers in an effort to bring about peace. “But Sandmich” you say “the Japanese had chemical weapons too, and then it would have been okay for them to use it on us”. Well then, was the Japanese lack of nuclear capability the only thing that made using the bomb ‘correct’?

It was also, at least in my mind, a dangerous gamble. Mr. Kendall pointed out to me that the heads of the Japanese military didn’t want to surrender even then, and only the intersession of the emperor brought about peace. What if Japan didn’t surrender? What if they decided to use some nasty weapons of their own? Would people anywhere tolerate more nuclear bombing runs?

If I was Truman, I don’t know if I would’ve made the same call. In hindsight though, it would appear the correct decision was made; war is unavoidably nasty. No doubt if the U.S. didn’t use the Bomb, and pictures continued to come back of American dead stacked up on Japanese beaches, Americans would be furious that we didn’t use our super weapon to put an end to the horror. As well, though the museum preaches the peace mantra now, it would’ve been more helpful if they did that before Pearl Harbor, it’s all to easy to puke that stuff up now.

A turtle with a huge drum on his back, inside the museum

Another view

Memorial