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MESSAGES
STUDENT PERSPECTIVES
the road, and then gave me a lift through a no-man’s
land between Laos and Vietnam, an area which you’re
not allowed to cross on foot. If I had been there in
my grandfather’s time, none of that would have been
possible, and whatever the differences between us,
they weren’t seismic enough to stop them from offering
a traveller some food, or to stop me from accepting
their offer gladly.
I did end up learning something very important about
identity, and the way it can be manipulated during war
to exacerbate a sense of ideological conflict. Ahead
of the bombing of Nagasaki, some pieces of American
propaganda used inflammatory imagery advocating the
total destruction of Japan. Certain Japanese propaganda
described Chinese people as animals, while in Nazi
Germany, medieval imagery and school text books
were used to perpetuate negative and anti-Semitic
stereotypes.
creatures that people work so hard to trick us into
thinking we’re not.
The last thing I visited in Nagasaki was a memorial to St
Francis Xavier, one of twenty-six Christians executed in
1597 as part of the outlawing of Catholicism in Japan.
The word ‘heaven’ was written there in Japanese, 天
国 , but the gloss for its reading, which tells the reader
how to pronounce the characters, wasn’t ‘tengoku’
which is the Japanese word for heaven, but was instead
‘paraiso,’ the Portuguese word. After a century marred
by racism, war, genocide, rape, and atomic destruction,
if an American can read Chinese characters in
Portuguese by a Christian grave in a Japanese city, then
I think there’s hope. n
I did end
up learning
something
very important
about identity,
and of the
way it can be
manipulated
Such propaganda seeks to undermine our humanity. Its
aim is to de-humanise societies and people identified
as ‘the enemy’. It’s worth considering the likelihood
of the bomb being dropped had the Americans felt
themselves more similar to their Japanese foes. What
if the American electorate had been told that Nagasaki
was a traditionally Christian city; that along with a
Shinto shrine, they destroyed a church from the 17th
century? That they had killed 100,000 Christians, with
whom they seemingly shared a common identity, rather
than the Japanese as depicted by wartime propaganda?
I think it’s because we are naturally good, caring, loving
ST CATHERINE’S COLLEGE 2012/33