Day #004

Day #004:

Tokyo.

The Stories We Don’t Talk About

This post attempts - maybe clumsily - to walk a fine line.

Until this week - outside of a few Haruki Murakami references - I didn’t know what happened here in Tokyo on March 9, 1945.

That night, over 100,000 civilians were killed by a U.S. firebombing raid - more than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It remains the deadliest single day of human-caused violence in recorded history.

And somehow, I’d never heard about it.

Just...silence.

As an American, I was raised to believe our actions in the “total war” against Japan were unequivocally good. That story made sense. The overarching attitude ingrained in me was simple:

What had to be done, was done. The end.

I’m not here to rewrite military strategy or judge the decisions of war. I’m here searching for something more personal - more universally human – not divided by national identities.

And this week, the story we don’t tell ourselves about what happened here in Tokyo started to feel too easy.

Walking through the city - riding the trains, eating in its neighborhoods, standing in places rebuilt from ash - the silence surrounding this history felt loud.

Because now I know what happened here.

And it’s not just the facts that stay with me - It’s the feeling of discovering a chapter no one ever mentioned.

It made me wonder:

What else do we choose not to remember?

What other stories go untold?

Again, I know I’m walking a fine line.

I’m not comparing the horrors of war to the systems we navigate in daily life. But I do think the instinct - the all too human reflex - is often the same:

Erase the discomfort. Keep the story clean. Move on.

I’ve felt it. I’ve watched it play out.

I’ve seen it in business - when executives celebrate growth without acknowledging the people who built it.

I’ve seen it in leaders who focus only on outcomes - never reflecting on the cost it took to get there.

And I’ve seen it in myself - when I blame others or circumstances for what I haven’t fully owned.

In cultures - corporate, organizational, personal - we move forward quickly and forget to reflect on the journey that got us there in the first place. We avoid the story we should be telling ourselves.

And when we do that, we don’t just forget the pain.

We forget the lesson.

The context.

The complexity.

The truth.

What if we made space for the full story - even when it’s uncomfortable?

What if the stories we told honored memory as much as they valued results?

I don’t know exactly what that would look like - But I believe this:

Remembrance is its own kind of integrity.

Telling the stories we don’t want to talk about isn’t weakness.

It’s where the wisdom lives.

Maybe the real test of progress isn’t just what we achieve - but what we’re willing to carry forward.

Because how we get there is part of the story too…

And that part deserves to be told.