Americans Don’t Know What Hardcore Is

We also visited the Hiroshima shrine to Inari.

When we returned home, I baked my family’s Pumpkin Pound Cake recipe. Hisachan and her folks called it “panpukin keki.”

I am now expected to make it every time I visit. 

I was only able to bake this particular recipe because I had the foresight to pack a can of pumpkin puree, two baking pans, and my own measuring spoons and measuring cups. And because I have a unit converter app on my iPhone.

For any of you bakers out there, Japan’s measurements are—you guessed it—smaller than our American counterparts, though they sometimes have the same names.

So be wary of that!

Their ovens are also very small, and often high tech. Naoko-san’s had a fold out digital control panel with an auto-shutoff timer. It was pretty sweet.

The following day we would take a train to Uno in Okoyama Prefecture to visit Hisachan’s Hiroshima Coop. friend Mikichan, with whom we would stay for the next few days.

To send us off properly, Naoko-san made a beautiful meal, and served it to us in lovely lacquer bowls.

That evening, as I sat under the kotatsu writing about my experience at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park (published in our last entry), one thought which kept popping up was the idea that Americans just don’t know what hardcore is (excluding of course Native Americans, who definitely know what hardcore is).

We think we know, but we really have no idea.

Many people will no doubt point to the Twin Towers, and while surely that was a tragedy, it doesn’t really compare in magnitude or frequency to the kinds of shit most other places in the world have had to deal with. About 3,000 people died in the September 11th events, and we lost a couple buildings.

When the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the entire city was leveled, 200,000 people died, and many thousands more suffered and died in the following years from the effects of radiation. Moreover, other countries have had to face war on their own soil, but the U.S. hasn’t gone through that in centuries.

Not that anyone should have to go through that kind of bullshit, but you have to admit—the lack of direct national contact with such things must surely have an effect on our collective perceptions of war and violence.

I’m not attempting to posit that America’s warmongering necessarily stems from this, but my guess is that it is a related factor. Most pro-war folks I’ve met are people who haven’t had to deal with war personally in any way.

And how could they?

The video games and movies just don’t paint an accurate picture of mass human suffering. On the screen, it’s always heroic and entertaining. Fun for the whole family.

In real life, it just sucks in every way imaginable—and in ways unimaginable.

In any case, we went to bed, and prepared to meet Mikichan in Uno the next day.