By KAHO SHIMIZU

Shuichi Maeda worries about what will happen to society when elderly people who know firsthand the fear of war are gone.

By ERIC L. DUE

From 26,000 feet he punched through a hole in the overcast over Tokyo early on a freezing Feb. 12, 1945, rolled into a roaring 60-degree dive and fired his rockets at a Mitsubishi engine plant.

By JUN HONGO

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.

By KANAKO TAKAHARA

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.

By JUN HONGO

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 was a "frank man who looked like any other grandfather in the neighborhood," Iida recalled, although Matsui, then 64, had already commanded the Shanghai Expeditionary Forces in Nanjing.

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 to Fukushima Prefecture to join relatives. During their journey, the 33-year-old Sohma and her children, aged 5, 4, 2 and 6 months, had a hard time finding food and places to sleep. But with the help of people along the way, the family safely reached their destination after 10 days.

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 were forced to build the infamous Death Railway to their last breath. Lee had been specifically accused by nine ex-POWs of collaborating with the Japanese military in forcing sick prisoners to build the Thai-Burma railway until many died.

By SETSUKO KAMIYA

Kanji Murakami began his reporting career in January 1941, joining the Asahi Shimbun's bureau in Seoul, or Keijo as it was then known, when the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. At that time media censorship was strong. A 1909 law imposed many restrictions and curbed freedom of speech. Every newspaper was loyal to the Imperial government, which urged the nation to sacrifice for victory.

By AKEMI NAKAMURA

It was a rainy day in mid-August 1945. World War II was about to draw to a close, but nobody in the tiny Chinese village knew it. All they knew was that chaos was breaking out, and that the Russian military was approaching from the north. Noriko Suzuki was among some 600 Japanese sent to northeast China, in the region historically known as Manchuria, under a colonial government program for settling the region. That plan was clearly falling apart.

By ERIC PRIDEAUX

If Masamichi Shida, 80, had known a bit more about the world back in 1942, he might never have become a kamikaze. But Shida was just an impressionable junior high school kid when he took the first step toward becoming a warrior for the Emperor.