Yesterday we went to visit my wife’s uncle in the hospital. Making a hospital visit to a sick friend or family member is quite an involved custom, called omimai (oh-me-my!), not to be confused with omiai (oh-me-eye!) which is formal meeting with a prospective marriage partner usually arranged by your parents. This is the guy who fought in World War II, and he just loves me since I’m the only one who listens attentively to his recollections of the war. I don’t mind at all: it’s great to be able to talk with someone who lived through such vibrant history during a time when our two countries were bitter enemies, and I gladly listened for an hour as he talked about his years manning the large guns on the Battleship Ise, a mammoth vessel that was retrofitted after Midway so that the back end could serve as a carrier. (Being an anime fan, I had to convert the scenes he described into proper Yamato vs Gamilas space battles.) During the war, he escaped death no less than three times. The first was when an American bullet grazed his face, leaving a long scar. Then, his ship was to have been sent out with the Yamato on her final one-way mission, but there was no fuel so they got to stay at the shipyards at Kure. Finally, after the atomic bombing of nearby Hiroshima, the captain picked eight crew members out of a line to go to the city and see what had happened, and all eight men ended up dying of radiation poisoning. My wife’s uncle had been the tenth man in that line.
