Katsumoto Saotome was 12 the night he ran for his life through a sea of flames, jumping over smoldering railroad ties along a train track as US B-29 bombers rained incendiary bombs down around him.
The US bombing after midnight on March 10, 1945, annihilated a wide swathe of northeastern Tokyo, packed with small factories and houses made of wood and paper.
An estimated 100,000 people were killed, many of them women and children — a toll higher than those of the Dresden firebombing and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Photo: AFP
Now, as memories fade of how civilians suffered during World War II — suffering that Saotome blames on Japan’s wartime leaders who thought of their citizens as “weeds” — the 82-year-old author fears Japan might be marching toward war again.
“I think we’re turning backwards, down that road,” Saotome said, citing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plans to change the country’s war-renouncing constitution, his more muscular security stance and a state secrets act passed last year.
“Everyone thinks at first that it’s nothing, but more and more things accumulate, and then it’s repression,” Saotome said. “I worry about what happens to women and children in this situation. We have to talk about it — maybe that will put a brake on things.”
For Saotome and others of his age, the war stole their childhood. In school, before being conscripted to work in factories, they learned that the kamikaze divine wind would annihilate Japan’s enemies. Should Japan lose, they would have to choose death over dishonor and kill themselves.
“On Aug. 15, the day the war ended, we learned the emperor would speak to us by radio. This was unheard of,” he said.
“All I could think was that he was going to ask us all to die. Even a child knew by then that the divine wind wouldn’t save us,” he said.
That March, Tokyo was being bombed day and night. Exhausted residents chose to pull blankets over their heads and sleep when air-raid sirens blew, instead of heading to shelters turned icy by an unusually cold winter.
Saotome, who lived near where Tokyo’s Sky Tree tower now stands, was woken by his father’s shout to a sea of red around their house.
They piled belongings on a cart and fled through the flames. Wind fanned by the conflagration plucked possessions from peoples’ hands, flinging them through the air.
“I didn’t know if I was really running or if I was in a dream, if I was flying through space. It still gives me goosebumps,” Saotome said.
Just before dawn, they reached the Sumida River, its water filled with bodies that he could barely see through eyes blurred by smoke and ash. The sun rose, but the city was gone.
With more than 80 percent of Japanese, including Abe, born after the war, Saotome worries that reluctance to discuss painful issues might mean repeating past mistakes. Political apathy is also a worry, he said.
Then there are Abe’s moves to recast wartime history in a less apologetic tone.
The government recently asked a US textbook publisher to change references to wartime “comfort women.”
“Those of us who survived have a duty to become a voice for the voiceless,” Saotome said. “If I’m quiet, it means I’ve accepted the situation. If we don’t speak up, the past will be made to disappear.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion