A packed auditorium resonates with the words of a teenage pilot, bidding his family farewell before his death in a suicide mission near the end of World War II.

The parting words, met with sobs from the audience, are read by an aging professor. They were penned by an older brother he barely got to know.

"Father and mother would have never imagined my death. I wish my soul would return into their arms in a dream," read Akira Yamashita, a professor emeritus at Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, in a hall at the Tachiarai Peace Memorial Museum in Chikuzen, Fukuoka Prefecture, in May.