86 The Economist May 21st 2022
Obituary Saotome Katsumoto
In1967,threeyearsafterJapanhadshownitsnewpostwarcon
fidence by staging the Olympic games, workmen on the Tozai
subway line in Tokyo unearthed the remains of an airraid shelter.
Inside it lay the skeletons of six people huddled together. Two
were children; some bones were burned. One adult held Buddhist
memorial tablets, from which they could be identified as the wife,
daughter and other relatives of Shizuo Tsuzuki, who had left the
shelter on an errand and was now a company president. There was
the wife he had not seen for 22 years.
Most readers of this news story shuddered and turned the page.
Saotome Katsumoto’s reaction was quite different. Here, brought
into the glare of daylight, was the tragedy that had been his only
subject for as long as he had been a writer: the American bombing
raid on Tokyo which, on a single night in March 1945, had killed
around 100,000 people and left a million homeless. A fleet of 334
b29s were sent from the Marianas to destroy the Shitamachi dis
trict, a poor and densely crowded part of the city, with the aim of
not only crippling Japan’s war production but, in the words of
General Curtis LeMay, to wipe Tokyo off the map.
It was the most deadly single air raid in history, with casualties
close to those in Hiroshima and surpassing Nagasaki, where
atomic bombs were dropped. But that newforged horror seared
those two cities into public memory, whereas the fire that devas
tated Tokyo—the worst of dozens of raids since November 1944—
was brushed aside and buried, like the skeletons on the Tozai line.
Mr Saotome was determined to break the silence. The Great
Raid had to be talked about and described in school textbooks,
where it did not rate a mention. Evidence had to be gathered, both
from the ground and from survivors. If no one else dared upset the
Japanese government, which was unwilling to reopen any ques
tions about the war, he would; because only he, it seemed, still car
ried the fire inside him. The inferno had begun with his father yelling at him, some
time in the earliest hours of March 10th 1945. He leapt from bed
and pulled on his clothes: his khaki civilian uniform, then a judo
robe. He also grabbed his only treasure, a cloth pouch of old coins.
The family was poor, his mother a seamstress and his father, when
he wasn’t drinking, a streetseller. Treasures were scarce.
He was a worker too, though he was only 12 and still a runny
nosed schoolboy. He collected scrap metal for the local ironworks
to make into grenades. Proudly, he wore his hachimakiheadband
with the word kamikazeon it, divine wind, and the red sun of Ja
pan. In school he was taught that Japan could not lose this war, be
cause they were all the emperor’s children and the emperor was a
god. He felt doubtful about that, but of course never said so.
He looked outside. The night sky was scorched crimson, and
flashes of light seemed to pass behind his eyelids. His mother was
fussing and gathering up cooking pots; his father was shouting
that they had to evacuate. Fire was already consuming Shitamachi,
where they all lived cheekbyjowl in wooden houses. It took only
12 minutes for one of those houses to burn down.
With their stuff piled on a handcart, they struggled down the
street: himself, his parents and his two sisters. People were crowd
ing and shouting everywhere, pushing from every side. But so was
the fire, chasing them like a living thing. Alleyways were blocked
with blazing futons, and molten glass hung from windows. The
heat was so intense that if they passed a waterbucket his father
would douse them all, but in moments his judo robe was dry
again. The wind, a strong northwester rather than the kamikaze
they needed, fiercely fanned the flames.
Afterwards, when they had all miraculously survived, he re
membered the dreadful futility of that night. His father carried a
bamboo watergun, a bigger version of a child’s toy, with the impe
rial chrysanthemum crest. A posse of neighbours, outside their
shelters, wielded bamboo fire brooms. A paper notice on the gate
of the ironworks urged workers: “Don’t be put off by such a little
thing!” But nothing mattered in the end except water and life.
With the eye of a budding writer, he also noticed incongruous
beauties. The flames, reflected in the underbellies of the b29s,
looked like tropical fish swimming in the sky; as he ran, sparks
darted round him like swallows. But horror ruled: a man beside
him instantly decapitated, bombblasts wrenching children from
parents, and the sight with the dawn of dozens of charred bodies
being dragged, with hooked poles, out of the Sumida river.
That night made him a pacifist, and in the name of pacifism he
needed to live and relive, record and teach, how terrible war was.
Since 1952, he had written novels and children’s books based on
the raid. After 1970, when a professor told him that only historical
evidence would keep the raid in the public eye, he began systemat
ically, with notebook and pen, to gather the memories of other
survivors. Eventually he turned their painful, halting conversa
tions into six published volumes of recollections.
He accepted that, fundamentally, Japan was to blame for what
had happened and for the AsiaPacific war itself. He had no ani
mus against Americans, except for LeMay, who was given the Or
der of the Rising Sun for rebuilding Japan’s air force; and even that
he held more against Japan, for being so craven. But the raid of
March 10th was, for him, an obvious breach of international law.
He hoped the government would help his cause, but was disap
pointed. No help was offered to civilian survivors. In 2002 he
opened his Centre of the Tokyo Raid and War Damage, filled with
relics, maps and manuscripts, but it had to be built on a modest
scale, with private funds, on the edge of the city. Clearly he hadn’t
said, or gathered, or written enough.
As for his chief ambition, to end war, that was also far off. In his
last weeks he watched footage of Ukrainians fleeing their country;
and saw among them still the figures of men and women fleeing
Shitamachi as it burned, pushing their handcarts, screaming after
their children, indelible as ever. nThe forgotten fireSaotome Katsumoto, ceaseless chronicler of the Great Tokyo
Air Raid, died on May 10th, aged 90