Papa's Coming Back To You: End Of War

The End of War: Papa’s Coming Home or as translated, “Papa’s Coming Back to You,” is one of those examples from the aftermath of war, in which the truths are often stranger than the fictions. It is a personal and poignant story of a Japanese soldier in China (Manchuria) at the end of World War II longing to get home to be with his children. It is a personally told and illustrated series of pictures and its format is kamishibai (literally ‘paper theater’) in which the story is illustrated on one side of the paper with the story narrative (and in this case an English translation circa 1949) written on the other. The 20th century represents a great paradox of the human condition. The scientific and technological achievements of the end of the industrial age, whether with light, matter, or the human organism and ecosystems are powerful achievements. The dawning of the postmodern information age holds unimaginable promise. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s words we, “we have dwarfed space and chained time.” But what characterizes an undeniable truth of the past century is a paradox of the human spirit, our inhumanity to our fellow human beings. In the words of Dr. King, “the world is more and more of a neighborhood. But is it any more of a brotherhood? If we don’t learn to live as brothers and sisters we shall perish together as fools.”