Survivor still haunted by night's fiery terror
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 Tokyo ...
War exacts top toll on bottom echelons: vet
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 ...
Aug. 13 field draftee fast-tracked to Soviet gulag
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, 80, ...
A long life of peace that sprung from war
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 had somehow ...
Vivisectionist recalls his day of reckoning
Eleventh in a series Donning the crisp, Imperial Japanese Army khakis gave Ken Yuasa a sense of power, as a superior being on a mission to liberate China from Western colonialism. "The uniform made me feel incredibly sharp. Once I put it on, I was convinced ...
The horror of war cannot be forgotten
Tenth in a series 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 long and bloody years ...
Hellcat bent for leather — a navy flyboy's tale
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. As antiaircraft tracers whizzed around him, he leveled his Grumman ...
Veteran navy officer keeps an open mind
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 war. "I remember visiting Singapore often ...
Nemuro raid survivor longs for homeland
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.
Vet blames those on high for war's sins, delusions
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 was a ...
Censors unable to hide defeat: China escapee
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 ...
Spared Korean war criminal pursues redress
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 ...
