“War is war.”

I think it’s because of my parents, that we don’t have too much—trauma, as you call it.

Because whenever anybody asked my father, Wasn’t it a terrible war? And you were incarcerated?, he would say: War is war. And left it at that.

So, I think we adopted that, um, feeling, or whatever you call it. War is war! It happened other places, too! So, I think, I—I don’t know about my, uh, siblings, but I—adopted that same attitude: War is war. It’s just the way it is! You can’t do anything about it. You just take it as it comes.

I mean, in Europe, too. You know, things happened, and… why dwell on it? No use dwelling on it. Just go forward, right? So, I think that was a good thing that my father said. War is war.

In this black and white photo, a man, dressed in pants and a sweater, stands amongst a pile of rubble. The backdrop is mountains, covered in trees.
Mitsujiro Hamaguchi, 1957, likely in Greenwood, British Columbia.
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