Tokuro Inokuma, a former Imperial Japanese Army soldier, got his first taste of the horrors of war in 1945 when he scrambled to gather up the scattered limbs of his fellow servicemen, blown apart by a U.S. air raid in Japan. He was 16.
One of a dwindling number of World War II veterans, Inokuma now finds troubling echoes in the Abe administration's policy shift away from the pacifist ideals adhered to after 1945.
"I find it quite dangerous. . . . This is the path we once took," said Inokuma, who fought in China soon after the deadly air strike, and survived two years in concentration camps in the Soviet Union following Japan's surrender.