Iwojima mementos bring closure

[AsahinaKimi]

Source: The Japan Times

American, 86, returns war keepsakes to Japanese kin



By ERIC TALMADGE
The Associated Press

For decades, the faded photograph of a baby Japanese girl and a child's colorful drawing hung on a wall in the home of Franklin Hobbs III in America.



Wartime memento: A framed drawing by Chie Takekawa of an air raid drill during the war was shown at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on Friday. AP PHOTO



As a 21-year-old U.S. soldier fighting on Iwojima, now known as Iwoto, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, Hobbs found them in the pocket of a fallen Japanese soldier and took them as a souvenir.

Until recently, he tried not to think too much about the battle or the photo and drawing. Then, a few years ago, at his wife's suggestion, he decided to try to give them back.

For the girl in the photo and her sister, they meant the world.

Hobbs, now 86, returned to Japan two weeks ago for the first time since the war and met with one of the daughters whose life he changed by returning the items. Chie Takekawa had drawn the picture of an air raid drill that Hobbs found on her father — a man she barely knew and whose remains have never been found.

Read more: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20101102f2.html

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I always love these kind of stories...

[UndertheOcean]

1. Oh so sweet , too bad about the war

[Xenotime]

8. True. So many needless deaths.

[Javaman]

2. I wonder, if the current crappy wars ever end, will the soldiers of today, 70 years hense..

return items to the Iraqi and Afghanistan familys?

[gratuitous]

4. No, Saddam's pistol will become a Skull-and-Bones heirloom

Despite the absolute prohibition against taking war trophies. Which is probably all you need to know about a secret society of overrich frat boys who have an outsize sense of unearned privilege.

[davepc]

5. It's on display at the Bush library.

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/artifacts-of-george-w-bush-presidency-displayed-in-new-exhibit/19685103

The bullhorn President George W. Bush used to speak to rescue workers three days after the Sept. 11 attacks and the pistol taken from Saddam Hussein when he was captured in Iraq two years later are among the artifacts featured in a new exhibit opening Saturday at a museum in Dallas.

The collection at the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University amounts to a preview of what will become the Bush presidential library center on the campus. Groundbreaking for the center is scheduled for next month, and the facility is set to open in 2013, The Dallas Morning News reports. Bush's memoir, "Decision Points," is scheduled to be published in November.

[Red1]

3. Fantastic!!

[BuelahWitch]

6. I read this the other day on Yahoo

It made me cry! So beautiful!

[rug]

7. The effects of war live on for decades.