The sight of a U.S. airplane flying over Tokyo, apparently to check what damage aerial bombing had done to the capital, was the moment when Kimie Nemoto felt Japan was heading for defeat in World War II.

Nemoto, a student at a commercial high school in 1945, had been dispatched to a workplace under the government's student mobilization program to make up for an acute shortage of labor in the closing days of the war.

Nemoto and her classmates enjoyed their youth despite the tough wartime living conditions, talking about boys they liked and listening to records. "I remember a professional singer visited us on the work floor," she said.