By Masaki Mori Our current, perpetual nemesis Wields invisibility and silence To take the disposable body And shrivel the mind dry Depriving our voice of the last breath In isolation, unheard, uncared for, No utterance signals viral dominance Stretch our being, in and out, Stir the air with our expression As a sign of life for co-motion Modest, yet resilient to withstand The infinitesimally insidious This is our call to arms from lonely cells A trial now to mold our future selves Akira Kurosawa was thirteen years old when he survived the Great Kanto Earthquake that struck Tokyo and killed more than one hundred thousand people on November 1, 1923. The following day, his elder brother took him out around the destroyed city so that they could observe not just collapsed, charred buildings but also disfigured human casualties in many forms, some in large groups. It is not that they had no fear. Rather, they chose not to turn their eyes from the reality. Kurosawa later reminisced on the experience. It probably became a foundation of a strenuous humanistic drive and a negativism that underlies it, both manifest in the films he created. Type of News/Audience: In The Time Of COVID