Author: Moobs

P’s Great-grandfather made a tidy little sum in the bus business. As the money came in, family life was transformed. Each summer, the family would rent a substantial scots baronial pile near their home town: Milton Lockhart. P’s family has films from the 1930s which show family weddings; horses charging about the meadows; children dancing on the lawn and a curl of smoke from the chimney of the gatehouse – another world in flickering sepia.

Eventually, the family bought a large house and the long inter-war summers were forgotten. Milton Lockhart, dark and neglected became rain-slick and defeated. Then, in the 1980s, the old house disappeared completely. It had been dismantled at the behest of a grinning Japanese film star and shipped to Japan where it sat, disassembled, in a warehouse awaiting its fate.

At this point Mr Hirai came to its rescue. Mr Hirai is a successful businessman of the sort P’s Great-grandfather would immediately have felt a fellowship with. His principal business is stone. To his evident frustration the Japanese continue to prefer to build and decorate their homes with wood. The black walls of Milton Lockhart would stand as an advertisment of sorts – a granite statement of the possibilities of building in stone.

That was how Milton Lockhart came be Lockheart Castle, brooding on a hillside in the Gunma Province of Japan. On behalf of P’s family we were tasked with finding the Castle. We brought with us, as a gift, a copy of the 70 year old family movies.

You read blogs so I know that, like me, you know how moving the written word can be. Often the skill of the writer transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Today I have been reading words that, without artifice of any kind, wrung my heart.

I sat in an archive in Hiroshima and read the translated accounts of the day of the bombing. One witness wrote of how he had been caught in the blast with a group of school friends. They were trapped beneath a collapsed building. Injured himself, he dug two friends free. But others called to him from beneath the rubble, begging to be rescued. Fire was spreading quickly and, unable to save those crying his name, he ran and ran until he was in the suburbs. He ran past people whose clothes had beeen burned away and whose skin hung from their fingernails. They called to him, desperately asking him to take them with him. He ran on without stopping.

When he has finished telling his story, he turns himself to entreaty; begging those he left behind to forgive him. There on the page, in a few words, is expressed an unimaginable pain – an unearned shame that he has never been able to come to terms with – desperate for a forgiveness that can never be granted.

Hiroshima is full of folded paper cranes. Here is the story behind them: A girl who was 2 when the bomb was exploded, developed Leukaemia at 10. She was told that anyone who folded a thousand paper cranes would have a wish come true. She died before she could complete the task. Her school friends then campaigned successfully to have a memorial erected to the child victims of the bomb. Schoolchildren send cranes that they have folded to be left at the memorial.

This picture is of paper cranes left at the feet of the angel that is at the centre of the Children’s Memorial.

 

These cranes are at the mound where the ashes of 70, 000 casualties are interred.

 

This last picture is of the hypocentre. The bomb exploded 600 m above this spot. I expected to see the sky broken in some way.

 

I had promised myslf I wouldn’t waste your time digging up amusing mistranslations whilst in Japan. Even when the Engrish phrase is more disturbing than amusing – like the disconcertingly menacing company slogan: “Let’s enjoy your life” – I have spared you.

However, I have succumbed to a knob-gag (I am English – I can’t help myself). One might have thought that manufacturers of the gnarly looking SUV might have thought (ahem) long and hard, before calling it the “Bighorn Plaisir”.

I theng kew.