Katsumoto Saotome

Katsumoto Saotome has spent much of his life documenting eyewitness accounts of those who survived the Tokyo Fire Bombings.

Seventy-five years ago, less than 10 miles from where he now lives alone in a low-lying neighborhood known for its moderate rents, Saotome survived the brutally effective American firebombing. Over the course of nearly three hours, an attack by the United States Army Air Forces killed as many as 100,000 people — more than some estimates of the number killed the day of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. But while the Japanese public — and the world — rightly remember Hiroshima as a living symbol of the horrors of nuclear war, the Tokyo firebombing is generally regarded as a footnote in any accounting of the war in Japan.

An aerial view of Tokyo after the March 10 bombing.Credit...

For 30 years, Saotome tried to secure public funding for a museum to commemorate the Tokyo air raid. In 1990, the city government designated March 10 as Tokyo Peace Day, and it commemorates the anniversary every year, but it never allocated funding for a museum. Undeterred, Saotome raised private donations and opened a modest museum 18 years ago.

Katsumoto Saotome at his home in Tokyo with his hachimaki headband from World War II.

Saotome was just 12 when he and his mother, father and two older sisters scrambled for their lives to escape the incendiary bombs that fell from low-flying B-29s.

As a child, Saotome spent his days working in an iron factory, collecting scrap metal for munitions. He still keeps the headband he wore to work, which bears the large red circle of the Imperial Japanese rising-sun flag and the Chinese characters for kamikaze, or “divine wind.” 

A hachimaki headband printed with the text “kamikaze” (“divine wind”) and the Japanese Hinomaru sun.

Children who worked in the factories were known as Jugo no mamorite, or “defenders behind the guns.” He said American war planners justified the air raids that targeted predominantly residential neighborhoods on the grounds that everyone, even children, was working for the war effort. “We were taught by teachers and on radio programs that Japan would definitely win the war because we were children of the god” — meaning the emperor, Saotome recalled. Even then, he said, he had his doubts, but he kept them to himself. “It was not an era when you could say anything like that,” he said. “If I ever said that I would be disgraced and considered a traitor.”