I'm in my late twenties, but my memories from around the age of ten and under are quite fragmented. Recently, I realized there is a strange scene among those fragments of memory.
When I was very young—I don't remember my exact age—I was walking down the stairs leading to the Ginza Line at Ueno Station with my mother. In the middle of the stairs were two men who looked like wounded war veterans. One of them was missing a leg and sitting, leaning against the stairs. The other was standing beside him, playing a red accordion and singing.
At the time, I didn't know the word or the existence of "wounded war veterans," but I sensed something strange about the atmosphere. When I asked my mother, "Who are those people...?", she told me, "You mustn't stare."
That is where the memory ends.
Time passed, and I still frequently use those stairs. Every time I walk through them, I remember those two soldiers and think to myself, "This place has really cleaned up. Until quite recently, it still had that post-war atmosphere."
However, quite recently—somewhat carelessly—I started to think something was off.
When I was a child, it was the late 1970s or 1980s. Wounded war veterans seemed to have disappeared from the streets by around the 1950s or 1960s, and the age of those soldiers (in their 30s or 40s) didn't add up either.
When that realization hit me, I was truly startled. When my mother said, "You mustn't stare," she was probably referring to the homeless men who were fairly common around there until recently, and perhaps the soldiers I saw weren't visible to my mother at all...
I don't think they were filming anything or doing street performances either. Lately, I've come to think that maybe they weren't people of this world.
Yet, for some reason, it doesn't feel all that terrifying, and I even feel somewhat glad I got to meet them there. It made me think that we must never forget the hardships of those who came before us.
Sorry for rambling on about something so trivial. If the people I saw were just ordinary living people, it would be quite embarrassing... If that's the case, please just forget this.
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