Rainbow 02
I’ve been putting off this episode, partly because I’ve had something to write about every day so far, and partly because I hoped FroZen could save me from ridiculously huge files. Well, I ran out of episodes. I cleared some space on my hard disk and sat back with a nice refreshment while I waited for it to finish. Okay, enough silliness. After all, prison is serious business.
OH GOD! Can we go back to just silliness? Please?
The boys arrived at the detention center in January, and some time has passed. Today, Joe has a visitor, the woman who runs the orphanage where he was raised. He arrived with a girl he treated like a sister, named Megu, and someone has adopted her. This prompts flashbacks to his childhood, where the two were all each other had. Unfortunately, the director sexually abused him. You can understand his concern for his sister given the orphanage’s record. When supplies arrive, an opportunity to escape presents itself, and his fellow inmates help him. He runs straight for the orphanage. This is actually a very bad move. A little forethought would tell you the officers would have the grounds under surveillance. Joe simply cannot think clearly under the conditions. Despite his normal mild manner, he’s filled with rage and sadness and wants nothing more than to protect his little sister. I imagine most of us would make the same crucial error. The officers capture him easily and he receives a severe beating for his escape.
Poor guy had already failed before he started.
On the other end of this equation, we have Megu. The orphanage director has just sold her off to a… rather unsavory fellow. You can tell she doesn’t like the arrangement just from looking at her body language. Yet, she still tells Joe off rather tersely. Why would she do such a thing to her brother? It’s quite simple. We do not like seeing our loved ones in pain, and we hate it even more when we cause the pain ourselves. Joe has put himself in danger by escaping the prison to search for her. Guards have roughly subdued him, and he’s even sustained a head injury. She can probably guess he will try to escape again at the next opportunity, and he might suffer even more. When Megu tells him to leave her alone and to think about himself, it crushes Joe. It crushes her as well, and she bursts into tears in the temporary safety of her room as she quietly thanks her brother for his concern. However, at least he will stay in the detention center and not suffer for her sake. I hope they will meet again someday, so she can tell him why she did this.
It hurts terribly, but at least he can be safe.
Finally, we have a very brief look at Spoon. He lost his family in the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He didn’t have any lost love for his abusive, alcoholic father, but he lost his sister. He still blames himself for leaving his sister behind when he went for a walk that day. I’m not going to cover anything about the nuclear attack for now, and I instead defer to the book Hiroshima by John Hersey. I know it’s required reading in some schools, and if you haven’t read it, you should. However, people seem to hold a misconception that anyone even near the blast zone died in short order. Shouldn’t Spoon have died already? Hersey’s book relates the stories of six people, five of whom were within a mile of ground zero. He followed up on them forty years later. Four of the six survived. The bomb caused a great deal of psychological and physical trauma to people, but it did not guarantee death. On that note, radiation exposure has probably shaped Spoon’s physical appearance. Next week, we should to learn a little about Baremoto.
Even in despair, never forget the good times you shared.
