Her Father-In-Law Poem by RIC BASTASA

He's really an interesting character.
When my kids were small,
he wasn't so happy that I'm talking to them in English,
because English is the language of the enemy.

Goodness, the war was over decades ago!

I felt it's weird.
I grew up listening to my grandparents and parents about how hard life was during the war and how cruel the Japanese soldiers were.
And here are my children listening to their grandfather's stories about his hard training as a kamikaze pilot.

He was recruited towards the end of the war,
and there were hardly any plane to practice on.

Basically, they were taught how to fly, not how to land, because anyway, theirs is a one-way mission.
Akiko said that it was fortunate that the war ended before he was sent to do kamikaze.
He said that it was 'zannen' (regrettable) that Japan lost the war, because he so wanted to see action!

Masanao thinks that his father had not actually been
to the front line and experienced the horrors of actual combat,
so his father clings to an idealist view on why Japan went to war.

Jya ne! So long for now