Marin County Board of Supervisors endorses H.R. 808

Kathrin Sears, Supervisor District 3
Marin County Board of Supervisors
3501 Civic Center Drive
San Rafael, CA 94903
415.499.7331 tel
415.499.3645 fax
ksears@co.marin.ca.us

February 7, 2012

Dear Ms. Sears,

Congratulations to you and the Board of Supervisors for endorsing H.R. 808, the Department of Peace.

Your decision is especially meaningful for my mother, a Mill Valley resident who still lives in the same house she and my father bought in 1961, two years after she arrived from Yokosuka, Japan.

I’d like to share with you what peace means to her.

My mother grew up in northern Japan during the second Sino-Japanese war and World War II. She told me about air raids and how she and her family hid in basements and caves for weeks at a time, sharing insufficient rations of soap and lamp oil and scavenging tiny fish, raw seaweed, anything.

She read about Santa Claus and a golden bridge in San Francisco. She watched cousins and friends and strangers die of simple things like dysentery for lack of proper food, clean water and medicine.

In nursing school the air raids began in earnest. By the time she was working in a hospital, starving circus animals were performing on abandoned grounds, pawing the air and jumping through imaginary hoops for food that had run out while people streamed into the hospital.

One young man pushed a wheelbarrow carrying his wife into the hospital after walking for days to find help, but his wife was already dead.

Another man walked into the hospital holding his stomach. When he saw my mother his arms dropped to his sides and his intestines spilled out.

My grandfather, Commander of the Western Sea Frontier, retired the year I was born. He used to say war is a dirty business. My mother always agreed with him and often said the people of Japan did not go to war with the people of the United States; it was a matter between our governments and the soldiers they sent. The citizens participated only in the air raids and blackouts, rations and hunger, disease, despair and fear.

As if to weed out the persistent memories of war, my mother has carved out a place of peace in her garden where she cultivates orchids and tends to stray and injured animals. As a surgical nurse she helped save many lives, but she told me it would be better not to risk them in the first place.

My mother is 87 years old and delights in the prospect of a Department of Peace.

Thank you.