Katsumoto Saotome was 12 the night he ran for his life through a sea of flames, jumping over smouldering railroad ties along a train track as U.S. B-29 bombers rained incendiary bombs down around him.
The U.S. bombing after midnight on March 10, 1945, annihilated a wide swath of northeastern Tokyo, packed with small factories and houses made of wood and paper.
An estimated 100,000 people were killed, many of them women and children — a toll higher than those of the Dresden firebombing and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.