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〜故 三宅晶子先生を偲んで〜 | INDEX お知らせ |
History and Prayers
Akiko Miyake
Kansai Toast Masters' ClubDecember 11, 2000
One bright summer afternoon in 1998, I was walking in Paris, the capital of France from Champs de Mars over a bridge across the river, the Seine. Here is the bridge going to the large staircase of a palace, looking down a small square. Usually the large staircase is seated by young couples. But on that afternoon, the staircase was empty.
People were standing in the square, looking very serious. A little altar was set in the middle of the square. On the left of the altar, a man was reading names slowly, one after another. At each name, a young man or a woman came out from the right, offering a little bunch of flowers to the altar. I asked the people what they were doing.
Yes, it was August 25, the Liberation Day of Paris.
In l940, when the Nazis Germans invaded France, the nation was split into two, the leftests and the rightests. If the war had been long, France would have disappeared between the war and the revolution. Marshal Pedans, the hero of the First world War, chose a surrender, but General Charles de Gaul escaped into England with his army. Paris was occupied by the Germans until August 25, 1944, when the Allied Army, the American, the English and the French forces liberated the city together. You may remember the news picture of that Great Liberation Day. Charles de Gaul was leading a tremendous march, and the uproar of the music of La Marseilles!
But the service I saw on the Liberation Day, l998, was not to celebrate their victory. It was to remember the poor foreigners, some 500 of them whom the Germans took away from Paris right before the Liberation. None of them returned to their homes. They were all shot dead somewhere in the battlefield. In regret the French people could not rescue them, the people in Paris were asking for the forgiveness of the dead.
As a Japanese I was really moved at this service. We had a defeat and suffered humiliations like the French. History is made of miseries, sins, sacrifices and even crimes. The French people could confess their weakness and their sins like this sad service on the street. Japanese people can not face our sins and our weakness. We can not even teach our sins to our young people in history.
It is a tradition of the French people to build a church and confess their
sins after each war, for instance, the famous church of the Sacred Heart
on the top of Mont Martre was built after the defeat of Napoleon the Third
in 1870. You may ask what is the use of the prayers and confessions after
the war? The dead will never return. Yes, the great use of the prayers
and the confession of the sins is to keep the soul of the nation alive,
to rescue the ideal of the nation. We Japanese people do not know how to
face our sins. Hence we have lost all our ideals and leave our younger
generations to suffer the emptiness of our spiritual life.
（2000年12月11日 関西トーストマスターズクラブ 例会 スピーチ原稿 B-8）
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