I am traveling and won't be back to my regular entries for the next week.

I'll check in as I can.

The Japanese are afraid of the change in their military readiness.

The seventieth anniversary of Hiroshma and Nagasaki has proven a point of conflict between the Japanese government and it's people. The survivors came to podiums to speak out at the increase in militarization of Japan. Pacifism has served Japan well and those that remember the WWII horror want to have nothing with an increase in Japan's military profile.

There was even a bike race around the bombs sites. Japan will never be a nuclear power, but, it lives in a dangerous neighborhood that includes an unpredictable North Korea. 

The world needs peace. Japan has been leading the way for a long time. 
 

August 9, 2015
By David McNeill

In the months (click here) after the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a new Japan emerged. Occupied by the allied forces to which it had surrendered, Japan adopted a new pacifist constitution, under which it would “forever renounce war”. In a country that was still losing tens of thousands to the effects of the bomb, the idea of peace was welcome.

At a commemoration of Nagasaki’s nuclear destruction on Sunday, those who lived through the horrors of 9 August 1945 warned that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe risked taking the country to the brink of a new war with his pledge to expand the role of the nation’s military forces.

“The security bills that the government is trying to push through would jeopardise our long-time movement for nuclear abolition and the hopes of hibakusha [atomic bomb survivors],” said Sumiteru Taniguchi, 86, to loud applause from the crowd in Nagasaki Peace Park. “We cannot allow this,” he said, looking directly at Mr Abe....