(Une chute d'eau artificielle)Earthquakes and Awe of God Common to Japan and the War Area
On Sunday night, Japan's Fuji TV news program reported on some victims of the recent earthquake, namely, mostly innocent, handicapped, humble, very old, very young, or good-natured people, though they have made Japan the second largest economy in the world in these decades, inevitably without relying on the vast land and abundant natural resources, as so fatally missing at this holy End of the East.
One of them is a schoolchild in the lower grade who has been haunted by a fear of another possible earthquake. Since the earthquake that happened last Monday, the little girl always checks where her mother is and cannot sleep in her room on the second floor of her house. She rather sleeps at an entrance of the house at night with a backpack always placed by her side or carried on the back.
When the earthquake hit the region near the Sea of Japan, it is said that even an adult was so heavily jolted, pushed up, and a kind of thrown from the ground or a floor or luckily forced to hold on anything fixed nearby.
The earthquake disarrayed and knocked down all furniture and every other thing inside most of the houses in the devastated area (which includes a nuclear power plant and a key component supplier to Toyota Motor), if a house was not destroyed.
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If you experience an earthquake once a year, regardless of its magnitude so long as you can feel it watching a floor and a ceiling of your house being shaken, you would surely come to be held in awe to the nature and a god.
If you never experience an earthquake so often, you may lack a notion that there is something in this world that you cannot, too clearly, control, cope with, or even predict unlike other natural disasters, since an earthquake is related to billion-year-scale movement of continental plates or in-land crush of a fault mostly unobserved from the surface of the ground. You can be more easily humble to the concept of the God.
I think that the little schoolgirl will in Niigata Prefecture grow up as an exemplary Japanese citizen in future with sound and adequate awe in the nature and God.
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Some Japanese virtue should be really formed and grow through this process of experiencing earthquakes and the deep fear they invoke. Put simply, to understand Japanese mentality, you have to experience earthquakes in Japan.
Indeed, the U.S. could not understand mentality of Chinese and Koreans, resulting in failure in the Korean War and subsequent death of millions of people in China and North Korea under inhumane regimes.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong)
The U.S. could not understand mentality of Chinese and Vietnamese, resulting in failure in the Vietnam War and subsequent death of millions of people in Cambodia and neighboring areas under inhumane regimes.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot)
If the U.S. can not understand mentality of those living in Afghanistan and Iraq, their military operations today might result in failure in the War on Terror and subsequent possible death of millions of people in the Islamic region.
But, the war between the Empire of Japan and the U.S. during WWII was an exceptionally well organized war between the two civilized nations in Asia/Pacific. The U.S. could rely on Imperial Japan's civilized functions in the war, which allowed for rational approach on the U.S. side unlike the above three subsequent cases that requested and still request more deeper understanding of mentality of those the U.S. was and is fighting against.
(Truly, the military of the Imperial Japan never intentionally targeted US citizens even in its attack on Pearl Harbor. Comparison of the 9/11 terror to the Pearl Harbor attack really misled the U.S. to wrong strategies against AlQaeda.)
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According to the world earthquake information , not only Japanese but also those around AlQaeda in the north of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border seem to have felt a warning in a form of an earthquake last week.
(http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Maps/region/Asia.php)
Truly, they should listen to Japanese if they remember the great one that occurred a few years ago in Northern Pakistan.
(If you are to ask a question to possible US Presidential Election candidates, you had better ask how much they understand mentality of Muslims and AlQaeda.
For example, Mr. George H.W. Bush once said that AlQaeda was nuts.
Do you think that Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton can understand Allah enough, so that she can handle the ongoing war while preventing possible death of millions of people in the Islamic region after near-future withdrawal of US troops, like in the cases of the preceding wars in the Korean Peninsula and the Indochina Peninsula?
I mean if you can do more, you have a mission. You can be greater. Yes, you can.)
"THE SON OF MAN IS THE LORD OF SABBATH"