I can't stop thinking about the protests in China. I blogged about it a lot in my other blog (www.kansaigaidaienglishtwo.blogspot.com). I found this poem on the internet, and I hope the author doesn't mind if I put it in my blog. It really made me think.

Dried Cuttlefish on a Persimmon Tree

by Nishimori Shigeo

When he was taken to China as a young soldier,
the first education was to stab a Chinese prisoner of war with a bayonet.
He was tied up to a persimmon tree and stabbed by forty-seven Japanese soldiers
who stood in a row one by one.
When N couldn't stab him, he was slapped on the cheek.
He was told, "Are you really a Japanese soldier?" in an angry voice.
He tried to stab him with set teeth closing his eyes.
He shivered and the point of the bayonet hit the air.
It grazed him.
The Chinese man was hanging like dried cuttlefish by the time
forty-seven soldiers finished stabbing him.
N stabbed him with his eyes open for the second time.
But both times it was as if the sky was suddenly overspread
with dense clouds, and the thunder rolled.
We shouldn’t do bad things, he murmured.
Whenever he saw a persimmon tree, it reminded him of the Chinese young man.

(Nishimori Shigeo, Partisan Before Dawn, Kochi: Grass Roots House, 1995, 74-175)