How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
About a year after Nakamura-san retired, she was invited by an organization called the Bereaved Families' Association to take a train trip with about a hundred other war widows to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo. […] The shrine was considered by many Japanese to be a focus of a still smoldering Japanese militarism, but Nakamura-san, who had never seen her husband's ashes and had held on to a belief that he would return to her someday, was oblivious to all that. She found the visit baffling. […] It was impossible for her to summon up a sense of her dead husband's presence, and she returned home in an uneasy state of mind. (5.25)
Mrs. Nakamura seemed to find some of the political "uses" of the dead (and particularly those who died in the war) perplexing. Apparently, she wasn't able to connect reverence for the dead to the political anger or "still smoldering Japanese militarism" in the way some others did.