The essayist Okabe Itsuko (1923-2008) readied herself for death throughout her life and, when it came in the early morning hours of April 29, with her died an independent woman's voice of conscience for postwar Japan. The translation which follows is of an address she gave at the annual service in memory of “all the war dead” held by Higashi Honganji temple in Kyoto, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq five years ago and a year before she announced she was laying down her pen after a half-century career of essay writing and a total of 134 books. The sight of the diminutive and frail 80-year old speaking before the great Kyoto hall of True Pure Land Buddhism, naming herself “a woman aggressor” responsible for the deaths of her loved ones in the war six decades earlier, may have been jarring but her touchstone story of her fiancé Kimura Kunio and her core value of respect for all people, including the weak and marginal, were well-known to a Japanese public longing for a voice grounded in the beauty of daily life and Japanese culture but unyielding in its call for peace and dignity and respect for all men and women.