ST. LOUIS — Yoshio Matsumoto was among the 110,000 Japanese-Americans seemingly bound for an internment camp soon after the United States entered World War II when a university he knew nothing about from a far off part of the country agreed to take him ...

23rd in a series Ichiro Koyama’s schedule is filled with lectures, talks and interviews. The 88-year-old, a former soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in Jinan, Shandong Province in China, believes he has a duty to pass on his war experiences to younger ...

22nd in a series FUKUOKA — The city has long been rebuilt and moved on, but Hiroshi Ito still can’t come to grips with Nagasaki’s obliteration by the United States 63 years ago. “I don’t have any hatred toward the U.S. now,” the 78-year-old ...

20th in a series The lone survivor of an infantry unit on Papua New Guinea in World War II, Kokichi Nishimura swore to his comrades he would bring their bodies back to Japan. Sixty years later, he is still trying to fulfill his promise ...

19th in a series About four months after World War II ended, Beate Sirota Gordon arrived in the charred ruins of Tokyo from New York City as a newly hired member for the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers. The 22-year-old American got the ...

18th in a series On Dec. 7, 1941, a 17-year-old high school student named Donald Richie was fixing the fence at his house in Lima, Ohio, when his mother ran out on the porch to tell him and his father that she just heard ...

17th in a series Free-falling from approximately 27,000 feet after his B-29 was critically damaged while flying over the Kanto region, Raymond “Hap” Halloran was all but certain his fate had been sealed. The navigator-bombardier was parachuting down behind enemy lines, more than 2,400 ...

Sixteenth in a series The blasts were so bright that March 10, 1945, night that Hiroshi Kobayashi could see the pilots’ faces in the low-flying formation of B-29 bombers as they dropped some 2,000 tons of incendiary shells and other explosives on his crowded ...

Fifteenth in a series In his childhood, war and militarism surrounded Tota Kaneko, a well-known haiku poet and retiree from the Bank of Japan. When he was a sixth-grader, Japan invaded Manchuria. By the time he was a student at Mito High School, Japan ...

Fourteenth in a series For Yoshiro Yazawa, the misfortune of being drafted just two days before Japan’s 1945 surrender ended up costing him three years in a Soviet concentration camp. “I was drafted by the Imperial Japanese Army on Aug. 13, 1945,” said Yazawa, ...