soon suffer. For a while I thought they had been wrong, but on May 25 it happened. As before, it was at eight o’clock.
“Once again I would hear that sound like heavy rain, and since each incendiary is like a number of bombs, when one hits the ground you don’t know where it’s going to explode. You see this very clearlyin Grave of the Fireflies . It’s all around you. In a situation like this, people don’t grab hold of each other’s hands and hide together. They look out for themselves. The first set of planes drops its bombs, then a second lot drop more bombs, and maybe you choose to hide under a tree in a park. If you’re lucky, no firebomb falls on that tree and you survive. But there’s no logic that tells you where to go to hide. You could have chosen a tree at the other side of the park and you’d be dead.
“The irony of it is that our house wasn’t hit at all during the bombing. If we had stayed there, we wouldn’t have seen the horrors we did.
“Until the night of a Yamanote firebombing, my family were resigned to the fact that I would go to fight. Now they had seen war with their own eyes, all they could think of was finding me somewhere safe to hide.
“At the beginning of June, my mother took me to a city in Yamanashi Prefecture. Kofu was a resort, completely surrounded by mountains, one of which is Fuji. In Kofu, my father thought, it would be impossible to be attacked from the air. The bombers would have to go over and between mountains, down into this basin. So my mother bought a house there and we lived there together. Given my father’s important role in propaganda, no one insisted that Icontinue to work in a factory. In any case, there were very few factories left.
“July 7 is the day of the festival of Tanabata— you write a wish on paper and you tie it to a piece of bamboo. I can’t remember what I wished for, but it certainly was not what happened on that night.
“Apparently the American air force had planned to attack Niigata with B29 bombers but then they discovered that the weather was bad, so they attacked Kofu instead. Though Niigata is a big industrial port town, all Kofu had was one factory manufacturing aircraft parts and one very small garrison of elite special forces. Somehow these soldiers knew, even before the sirens sounded, that the bombers were coming. So they ran away, leaving the rest of us completely undefended. On that day I understood that the army was not there to protect people after all.
“It’s not so much the sirens I remember as the lights. The Americans had been able to land forces and set up huge searchlights on a hill above the town. One minute it was a lovely silky Tanabata night, next thing we were less than insects, the whole town caught in a blinding white light.
“Our house was on the very edge of the town with nothing but rice paddies for neighbours, so I ran to where there were no buildings worth bombing.In all the panic, I was separated from my mother, but we’d been looking after this younger kid—he’d lost his parents in the Tokyo attack. This little boy trusted me, depended on me, so there was no question I had to protect him. I even waited while he gathered up toys, carrying them with him as we ran out into the dark. As for my toys, I lost them all.
“We stayed together in the rice paddies until the Americans had destroyed Kofu. Since the town was small, it took only two or three hours until no building remained.
“When I made my wish on Tanabata, three hundred thousand people were living in Kofu. Next morning, one hundred thousand of them were dead. You cannot imagine what it was like to go back. The streets were full of dead bodies and we had to walk over them. Many were still burning, and you could see their smouldering red-pink flesh. There were people who died standing up, completely charred and dead.
“And I thought that it was no longer a matter of winning a war or losing a war. This was the end of the world, or even worse.
“Once again I would hear that sound like heavy rain, and since each incendiary is like a number of bombs, when one hits the ground you don’t know where it’s going to explode. You see this very clearlyin Grave of the Fireflies . It’s all around you. In a situation like this, people don’t grab hold of each other’s hands and hide together. They look out for themselves. The first set of planes drops its bombs, then a second lot drop more bombs, and maybe you choose to hide under a tree in a park. If you’re lucky, no firebomb falls on that tree and you survive. But there’s no logic that tells you where to go to hide. You could have chosen a tree at the other side of the park and you’d be dead.
“The irony of it is that our house wasn’t hit at all during the bombing. If we had stayed there, we wouldn’t have seen the horrors we did.
“Until the night of a Yamanote firebombing, my family were resigned to the fact that I would go to fight. Now they had seen war with their own eyes, all they could think of was finding me somewhere safe to hide.
“At the beginning of June, my mother took me to a city in Yamanashi Prefecture. Kofu was a resort, completely surrounded by mountains, one of which is Fuji. In Kofu, my father thought, it would be impossible to be attacked from the air. The bombers would have to go over and between mountains, down into this basin. So my mother bought a house there and we lived there together. Given my father’s important role in propaganda, no one insisted that Icontinue to work in a factory. In any case, there were very few factories left.
“July 7 is the day of the festival of Tanabata— you write a wish on paper and you tie it to a piece of bamboo. I can’t remember what I wished for, but it certainly was not what happened on that night.
“Apparently the American air force had planned to attack Niigata with B29 bombers but then they discovered that the weather was bad, so they attacked Kofu instead. Though Niigata is a big industrial port town, all Kofu had was one factory manufacturing aircraft parts and one very small garrison of elite special forces. Somehow these soldiers knew, even before the sirens sounded, that the bombers were coming. So they ran away, leaving the rest of us completely undefended. On that day I understood that the army was not there to protect people after all.
“It’s not so much the sirens I remember as the lights. The Americans had been able to land forces and set up huge searchlights on a hill above the town. One minute it was a lovely silky Tanabata night, next thing we were less than insects, the whole town caught in a blinding white light.
“Our house was on the very edge of the town with nothing but rice paddies for neighbours, so I ran to where there were no buildings worth bombing.In all the panic, I was separated from my mother, but we’d been looking after this younger kid—he’d lost his parents in the Tokyo attack. This little boy trusted me, depended on me, so there was no question I had to protect him. I even waited while he gathered up toys, carrying them with him as we ran out into the dark. As for my toys, I lost them all.
“We stayed together in the rice paddies until the Americans had destroyed Kofu. Since the town was small, it took only two or three hours until no building remained.
“When I made my wish on Tanabata, three hundred thousand people were living in Kofu. Next morning, one hundred thousand of them were dead. You cannot imagine what it was like to go back. The streets were full of dead bodies and we had to walk over them. Many were still burning, and you could see their smouldering red-pink flesh. There were people who died standing up, completely charred and dead.
“And I thought that it was no longer a matter of winning a war or losing a war. This was the end of the world, or even worse.
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