The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-15)

SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9

obituaries

BY PHIL DAVISON

Katsumoto Saotome, who as a
12-year-old schoolboy survived
the American firebombing of To-
kyo during World War II and
later spent decades chronicling
in books and documentary films
the largely forgotten episode that
killed as many as 100,000 civil-
ians and left about 1 million
homeless, died May 10 in Saita-
ma, a city north of Tokyo. He was
90.
His publisher, Iwanami Sho-
ten, confirmed the death to the
Associated Press. Japan’s public
broadcaster, NHK, reported or-
gan failure as the cause.
Mr. Saotome was at home with
his parents and sisters March 10,
1945, when 334 low-flying Ameri-
can B-29 “Flying Fortress” war-
planes firebombed the city, level-
ing much of it. The devastation
presaged the American atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Na-
gasaki that August, followed
weeks later by Japan’s uncondi-
tional surrender.
The atomic bombings were
front-page news around the
world, with memorial sites and
museums set up by postwar Japa-
nese governments. But Mr. Sao-
tome said the firebombing of
Tokyo, using a jellied petroleum
prototype of what would become
napalm, fell from memory in the
wider world. (The jelly even set
fire to local rivers where Tokyo
residents, including Mr. Sao-
tome’s family, fled to get away
from the land fires.)
The Irish Times in 2005 quot-
ed one B-29 pilot, Chester Mar-
shall, as saying: “At 5,000 feet you
could smell the flesh burning....
I couldn’t eat anything for two or
three days. You know it was
nauseating, really. We just said
‘What is that I smell?’ And it’s a
kind of a sweet smell, and some-
body said, ‘Well that’s flesh burn-
ing, had to be.’ ”
Mr. Saotome noted that the
death toll in Tokyo, although less
than the atomic attack on Hiro-
shima (140,000 dead), was high-
er than the one in Nagasaki

(70,000) and far higher than the estimated 25,000 dead from the Allied firebombing of the Ger- man city of Dresden in February

He said he believed postwar
Japanese governments tried to
downplay the Tokyo bombing so
as not to exacerbate relations
with its American occupiers.
More than two decades later,
Mr. Saotome recalled to the New
York Times, he was making a
living as a full-time novelist
when he attended a history lec-
ture and asked why the incendi-
ary bomb campaign over Tokyo
was never mentioned in school
texts. When the speaker, a profes-
sor, said little documentation
was available for historians, Mr.
Saotome recalled finding re-
newed purpose as a writer.
He scoured the country for
eyewitnesses, asked the govern-
ment for access to archives and
in 1971 published the accounts of
seven survivors in a book that
sold hundreds of thousands of
copies, the Times reported. Sev-
eral more volumes followed,
mostly nonfiction works but also
novels and a children’s book with
the air raid as the backdrop. He
also wrote the screenplay of the
1991 Japanese film “Sensou to
seishun” (War and Youth), with
the bombing of Tokyo playing a
central role in the drama.
Despite losing his childhood
home during the attack, and
seeing so many of his friends and
neighbors dead, Mr. Saotome
said his writings were never
intended as anti-American, but
always “pro-peace.”
After all, he told the Nikkei
Weekly, the Japanese had carried
out an indiscriminate air raid on
civilians on the Chinese city of
Chungking in 1938.
“This ‘eye for an eye’ mentality
was paid for by the suffering of
civilians,” he said.
Mr. Saotome was born
March 26, 1932, in a district in
the north of Tokyo but brought
up in the eastern part of the city
known as shitamachi (low town)
where poorer families lived. His
father was reportedly denied the

military draft because of a body weakened by alcoholism, while his mother was a seamstress. Mr. Saotome, his mother, father and two older sisters had scrambled for their lives as the American B-29s dropped incen- diaries on Tokyo from midnight March 9, 1945, until before dawn as part of what the Americans called Operation Meetinghouse. The U.S. military said it target- ed densely populated areas of Tokyo, mostly made up of wood- en houses at the time, because they included small factories that produced ammunition and parts for the Imperial Japanese army. Mr. Katsumoto, despite his age, also worked in an iron factory for which he collected scrap metal from the streets to be turned into munitions for the war effort. Mr. Saotome told the Times that American war planners con-

doned the raids on residential neighborhoods because civilian families, including youngsters, were involved in the war effort. He added that there was consid- erable pressure on the young and old to do what they were told as their patriotic duty for an em- peror considered a near-deity. “We were taught by teachers and on radio programs that Ja- pan would definitely win the war because we were children of the god,” he said, adding that his own private doubts went unex- pressed. Objecting would lead to disgrace and charges of treason, he explained. A strong northwesterly wind the night of the attack acted as a bellows, fanning flames so high and wide that B-29 pilots on their way back to base at Guam said they could see the flames from 150 miles away over the Pacific.

“It was like looking at a picture through a red filter,” Mr. Saotome told the Times in 1985. “The fire was like a living thing. It ran, just like a creature, chasing us.” According to U.S. military rec- ords, nine B-29s were shot down that night, each carrying a crew of 11. Years later, as a writer, Mr. Saotome spent years trying to identify the downed B-29 pilots. Speaking to the Yomiuri Shim- bun newspaper in 1993, he said one of the B-29 bodies found was a woman, and he speculated she may have been an American war correspondent, although he was never able to confirm it. His proudest achievement, be- yond his books and films, was to set up the museum to commemo- rate the bombings. The Center of the Tokyo Raid and War Damag- es, which opened in 2002 and was built through private dona- tions, sits on the outskirts of the capital city. Mr. Saotome’s museum attracts less than 10,00 0 visitors a year, many of them groups of students, far from the more than 1 million annual visitors to the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. Information about Mr. Sao- tome’s survivors was not im- mediately available. In 1990, he published a children’s book titled “Tobe Tobe Hiyoko” (Fly, Fly Away, Little Chick), based in part on one of his recollections: While antici- pating an aerial raid of some kind, neighbors of Mr. Saotome killed a rooster, kept by a child as a pet, because of its loud crowing. “I want children to under- stand that people sometimes vent their frustration on the harmless when their lives are in constant threat,” he told the Dai- ly Yomiuri in 1990. “After losing everything in the fire, people regretted their selfish actions and realized that if they had kept the rooster alive, it might have awakened them up before the raid. I want children to under- stand that war kills all living creatures.”

KATSUMOTO SAOTOME, 90

Survivor of Tokyo firebombing chronicled its horrors

ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY IMAGES Katsumoto Saotome, seen in 1970, was 12 when American warplanes firebombed Tokyo in 1945. In 1971, Mr. Saotome published the accounts of seven survivors, and more volumes followed.

BY MATT SCHUDEL

John Leo, a former columnist
for U.S. News & World Report
who delighted in puncturing the
liberal pieties of college campus-
es, mocking political correctness
and satirizing the idea of cultural
victimhood, died May 10 at a
hospice facility in the Bronx. He
was 86.
He had Parkinson’s disease
and had been hospitalized with
covid-19, said his daughter Alex
Leo.
Mr. Leo spent much of his
career as a journalist for main-
stream publications, including
the New York Times and Time
magazine, but he was best
known for writing biting and
often humorous opinion col-
umns that drew on his Catholic
education and a sense of moral
outrage about modern life.
“I’m a moralist,” he told Chris-
tianity Today in 1996. “It’s a dirty
word these days, but I approach
things in terms of right and
wrong.”
Mr. Leo called himself the
“founder of the anti-sensitivity
movement,” but his often jocular
style masked a deep-seated belief
that American culture had gone
off the rails — veering to the left
— and that it was his duty to blow
the whistle.
“I think millions of Americans
are in shock and mourning at the
cultural breakdown we see all
around us,” he said in the Christi-
anity Today interview. “There
must be a way to stand up and
say, ‘This is not the way our
culture has to go.’”
Mr. Leo pointed to the 1960s
as the beginning of what he saw
as the steady decline of American
life, including changes in family
structure and a growing militan-
cy among students, minority
groups, gay people and women.
“We have a grievance-based
left now,” he said in 2001 on Fox
News, where he was an occasion-
al commentator. “If you cannot
point to yourself as a victim, you
can’t get anywhere in American
life.”
Mr. Leo did not consider him-
self an ideologue, and he seldom
wrote about partisan politics in
his weekly U.S. News columns,
which ran from 1988 to 2006 and
were syndicated in more than
100 newspapers. He preferred to
focus on what he described as

politically correct (PC) developments in education, culture and sexual mores. “Read one column and you may think Leo’s just another cranky Caucasian guy, bitter over becoming the scapegoat of the day,” journalist John Allison wrote about Mr. Leo’s 1994 col- lection, “Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police,” for the Pitts- burgh Post-Gazette. “Consume all of ‘Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police,’ however, and it becomes clear that Leo has a big heart, an open mind that has thought things through and a ‘tough love’ attitude toward PC manifestations.” Mr. Leo pointed out lapses in mainstream media, condemned the lyrics of rock music and hip-hop for their vulgarity and

took umbrage at the popular 1991 film “Thelma & Louise,” about two women on the run after killing a man. “All males in this movie,” he wrote, “exist only to betray, ig- nore, sideswipe, penetrate or ar- rest our heroines.” He viewed the Pledge of Alle- giance, to which the words “under God” were added in 1954, as a bulwark against growing secu- larism. “To religious conservatives,” he wrote, “‘under God’ is a cru- cial symbol, the last religious reference left in the schools since the separationist makeover of education.” Mr. Leo believed that efforts to instill self-esteem and ethnic pride in students were misguid- ed and undermined the basic

purpose of education. “Real self-esteem is released when a child learns something and develops a sense of mastery,” he wrote in a 2002 column. “It is a by-product of, and not a substi- tute for, real education.” He often railed against “elites” — invariably meaning liberal elites — despite living in New York and working for prestigious publications and, later, a think tank. Some of Mr. Leo’s detractors pointed out that his arguments were sometimes bolstered by distortions and dubious asser- tions. In 1996, for instance, Mr. Leo wrote that “the amount of do- mestic violence initiated and conducted by men and women is roughly equal. In fact, women

may well be ahead.” The authors of the study Mr. Leo cited to support his column said he grossly misinterpreted their statistics, adding, “When we look at injuries resulting from violence involving male and fe- male partners, nearly 90 percent of the victims are women and about 10 percent are men.” John Patrick Leo was born June 16, 1935, in Hoboken, N.J., and grew up in Teaneck, N.J. His father designed stainless steel fixtures for hospitals and kitch- ens, and his mother was a teach- er. Mr. Leo commuted to Manhat- tan’s Regis High School, a prestigious Jesuit institution, then graduated in 1957 from St. Mi- chael’s, a Catholic college affiliat- ed with the University of Toron-

to. He later told Christianity To- day that he had abandoned his earlier religious beliefs. “I grew up in the Catholic tradition, and my head is perma- nently shaped by it,” he said. “I believe its social principles, and I defend religion against the as- saults of a wrongheaded culture.” He began his career at the Record newspaper in Bergen County, N.J., then worked as an editor and columnist for Catholic publications before writing about intellectual life for the New York Times from 1967 to 1969. After working for New York City’s Department of Environ- mental Protection, Mr. Leo launched the Village Voice’s media criticism column in 1973. The next year, he moved to Time, where he covered cultural and religious trends. Despite his conservative views, the affable Mr. Leo had friends from every political view- point and was the longtime orga- nizer of a literary softball team in Sag Harbor, N.Y. His first marriage, to Stepha- nie Wolf, ended in divorce. Survi- vors include his wife since 1978, the former Jacqueline McCord, a former top editor of Family Cir- cle, Readers’ Digest, Consumer Reports and Good Morning America; two daughters from his first marriage, Kristin Leo and Karen Leo; a daughter from his second marriage, Alexandra Leo; two sisters; a brother; and three grandchildren. In 2006, Mr. Leo became a fellow of the Manhattan Insti- tute, a leading conservative think tank, where he had a blog about developments in higher education until 2016. From time to time, Mr. Leo devoted his column to skewering the conventions and pomposities of journalistic prose. “For instance, ‘omnipresent’ means insufferable, as in ‘the Omnipresent Yoko Ono,’” he wrote. He also mocked the prolifera- tion of hyphenated modifiers, “the more meaningless, the bet- ter: in-depth interviews, blue- ribbon panels, tree-lined streets. In the whole history of American journalism, fewer than twenty streets have failed to be identi- fied as tree-lined.”

JOHN LEO, 86

Conservative columnist saw himself as whistleblower on American culture

2000 PHOTO BY JACKIE LEO John Leo at home with his cat, Ralph, in Water Mill, N.Y. He called himself the “founder of the anti-sensitivity movement,” telling Christianity Today in 1996 that “millions of Americans are in shock and mourning at the culture breakdown we see all around us.”

Despite losing his

childhood home

during the attack,

and seeing so many

of his friends and

neighbors dead, Mr.

Saotome said his

writings were never

intended as anti-

American, but

always “pro-peace.”

The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-15)

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