Last weekend a bunch of the kids at my school were part of the Fukutsu Peace Concert. Very cool and very fun.
As a bonus, I got to figure out that perplexing elephant story from the Christmas concert Sandy and I went to...
Turns out it's based on a true story - Amazon.com: Faithful Elephants : A True Story of Animals, People and War: Books: Yukio Tsuchiya,Ted Lewin:
"In an unnamed war, Tokyo was being bombed ``day and night.'' The Army commands that the dangerous animals in the Tokyo Zoo be poisoned so that they might not escape in the event of a direct hit (witness a double-page spread of a dead tiger, a bear, a lion, and a large snake). When it is the elephant's turn to die, he refuses to eat food which has been poisoned and his skin is too thick to take an injection of poison, so the decision is made to starve him to death. Two more elephants must follow, and the real tension produced in the story is the pathos surrounding the torturously slow death of these big pets by depriving them of all food and water. No punches are pulled: these dying elephants use some of their last strength to perform a trick for which they have been customarily rewarded with food and water. They die, horribly, and are mourned by the zookeepers who ``raised their fists to the sky and implored `Stop the war! Stop the war! Stop all wars!' ''"
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