Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Mar 7, 2008

Survivor still haunted by night's fiery terror

by Jun Hongo

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 ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Feb 27, 2008

War exacts top toll on bottom echelons: vet

by Tai Kawabata

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 ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Jan 5, 2008

Aug. 13 field draftee fast-tracked to Soviet gulag

by Jun Hongo

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, ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Dec 20, 2007

A long life of peace that sprung from war

by Sayuri Daimon

Twelfth in a series Tenkoko Sonoda recalls that when the war ended on Aug. 15, 1945, she was left with an unanswered question: Why had she survived when so many of her close friends and neighbors had died? Three times during the war she ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Oct 18, 2007

The horror of war cannot be forgotten

by Kaho Shimizu

Tenth in a series SHIZUOKA — Shuichi Maeda worries about what will happen to society when elderly people who know firsthand the fear of war are gone. That is why Maeda — who shipped out to central China in 1940 and fought for five ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Oct 10, 2007

Hellcat bent for leather — a navy flyboy's tale

by Eric L. Due

, Saipan and Saigon harbor of French Indochina (Vietnam), hitting oil tankers and fuel facilities critical to Japan’s war effort — all surprise hits. “The Saigon River was ink blue,” Olson recalled. Task Force 39′s speed was part of the element of surprise plotted ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Oct 5, 2007

Veteran navy officer keeps an open mind

by Jun Hongo

Eighth in a series As the public still debates the Imperial navy’s activities during the war, many veteran sailors say that at the time, at least, they saw their objective as liberating Asia from Western colonial rule. That is how Masayoshi Ito recalls the ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Sep 22, 2007

Nemuro raid survivor longs for homeland

by Kanako Takahara

Seventh in a series Shohei Yamamoto still has to choke back tears when he talks about the day he was expelled from his village of Shibetoro on Etorofu Island off northern Hokkaido, two years after Japan was defeated in World War II. When about ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Aug 22, 2007

Vet blames those on high for war's sins, delusions

by Jun Hongo

Sixth in a series Beyond the torment of World War II and his postwar incarceration on Java and at Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison, one of Susumu Iida’s earliest recollections of the war is meeting an Imperial Japanese Army general in fall 1942. Gen. Iwane Matsui ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Aug 21, 2007

Censors unable to hide defeat: China escapee

by Setsuko Kamiya

In April 1945, Yukika Sohma and her four small children boarded a packed train in Mudanjiang in Manchuria bound for the port of Rajin in what is today North Korea. From there, the family took a crowded ship to Niigata Prefecture, then another train ...

Special Presentations | WITNESS TO WAR Aug 18, 2007

Spared Korean war criminal pursues redress

by Akemi Nakamura

Lee Hak Rae was stunned on March 20, 1947, when he stood in an Australian military court in Singapore and was sentenced to hang as a war criminal for the brutal treatment he was accused of inflicting on ailing Allied prisoners of war who ...