Some things come together in making sense

Getting up in years now, it is interesting to discover how some things come together in making sense.

One such recent example has been from three items.

One is that 20 years ago I learned about the 700 year old Japanese Buddhism, called Nicheren Soshu Buddhism if I remember correctly the spelling - during WWII they opposed the war with the United States, being pacifists. Their members were given a choice of dying in prison or going to fight. A few that chose the prison route lived to carry on the group after the end of WWII; it then grew in size and at one time extended into the US, where I learned about it in some detail.

Second item on internet in recent times was an article which ferreted out that Japan, a rather small country, had its military spread quite thin in WWII, conquering Korea and China and islands across the Pacific. Where did they get the troops for occupying much of the islands we fought so hard at, like Corregidor and Okinawa? The article had discovered that many of the troops on those islands were not actually of the Japanese elite military. Having conquered Korea, they conscripted the farmers, the women to work in the military fabrication shops in Japan, and the farm boys into uniform and put on the islands; they had no interest in war against America, but were stuck there, no escape possible.

Third item was when listening in on a conversation locally where a man (who always acts a bit threateningly) was bragging about his father in WWII, a man of Amerind descent and used his Indian lore to go ashore before the main invasion of the islands began, and sneak into where the troops slept near the shore, and cut the throats of every other man sleeping in a row, so as to terrorize them. (Now I have known many Amerinds and such behavior was not typical of them, I know. But, there are all kinds in all groups.)

So it all comes together, where those island front line cannon-fodder troops were made of Korean farm boys and Japanese Buddhist peace dissenters, who got their throats slit as they slept. They possibly went to sleep praying for a way not to have the deaths of the Americans on their souls as bad karma; and thus got their prayers answered, although not nicely.

And could be the remaining ones then changed their opinion of Americans to be horrid monsters after all, to be fought harder, thus costing more American lives.

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I think that this was still irritating me a bit when a short time later I was writing the sci fi short story "Bouncing High Above the World", the creative subconscious mind sifting vast data to come up with story elements and flow. The story involves the landing of an experimental German bomber at the local airport where I live, a landing site that could always be counted on to be free of rain and clouds except for 15 days in the winter, back then. So in my sci fi story it was the backup landing site and circumstances forced the returning bomber's landing there, instead of back in Germany after bouncing across the upper atmosphere clear around the world, as it was designed to do. Axis sympathizers had long prepared the airport as a backup site for a fleet of such bombers, and had connections with the grandfather of the two main characters in the story, so as to link in the ranch where the pilot was taken to hide. Looking back, I think part of me was resenting the part about the peaceful Buddhists getting murdered on the island, and so used the stalker - now WWII hero - as the link to the ranch, where the story of the experimental aircraft got told around a campfire, and (in the story) proved true as the bomber was dug up where it had been hastily buried off the runway at the rarely used airport.