SPECIAL NEWS PRESENTATION Witness to war

SPECIAL NEWS PRESENTATION Witness to war To mark the 62nd anniversary of the end of the war, The Japan Times is publishing a series of interviews with firsthand witnesses of the country's march to war and crushing defeat. Each of our subjects — speaking with the authority that only those in the evening of life can command — testifies to the destruction humanity can inflict upon itself. But each has also shared their view of how younger generations can avoid the same tragic path. Demons still haunt Christian soldier By SETSUKO KAMIYA Before and during the war, Japanese believed the Emperor was a living god. They also believed they were fighting for him and dying on the battlefield was honorable. Read the article >> Ex-army cadet, 81, recalls war mind-set By NATSUKO FUKUE For Kotaro Kaneko, 81, entering the elite Imperial Japanese Army Academy during the war was merely a way to a better life and pay, just as students today go to university to get a better job. Read the article >> Imperial army war vet haunted by horrors in China By NATSUKO FUKUE Ichiro Koyama's schedule is filled with lectures, talks and interviews. The 88-year-old, a former soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in Jinan, Shandong Province in China, believes he has a duty to pass on his war experiences to younger generations. Read the article >> Recalling Nagasaki's fateful day By JUN HONGO The city has long been rebuilt and moved on, but Hiroshi Ito still can't come to grips with Nagasaki's obliteration by the United States 63 years ago. Read the article >> Veteran sheds hatred, finds Japan now like second home By TAKAHIRO FUKADA On April 7, 1945, Jerry Yellin and his fellow P-51 pilots of fighter squadron 78 took off from Iwojima to escort B-29 bombers en route to Tokyo. Read the article >> Finding Papua war dead a vet's life By DAVID McNEILL The lone survivor of an infantry unit on Papua New Guinea in World War II, Kokichi Nishimura swore to his comrades he would bring their bodies back to Japan. Sixty years later, he is still trying to fulfill his promise in a story of indomitable will and determination. Read the article >> Richie offers history lesson By TAKAHIRO FUKADA On Dec. 7, 1941, a 17-year-old high school student named Donald Richie was fixing the fence at his house in Lima, Ohio, when his mother ran out on the porch to tell him and his father that she just heard over the radio that Japanese forces had attacked Pearl Harbor. Read the article >> War trauma leads to efforts to reconcile By JUN HONGO Free-falling from approximately 27,000 feet after his B-29 was critically damaged while flying over the Kanto region, Raymond "Hap" Halloran was all but certain his fate had been sealed. Read the article >> War exacts top toll on bottom echelons: vet By TAI KAWABATA 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 was waging total war against China. Read the article >> Aug. 13 field draftee fast-tracked to Soviet gulag By JUN HONGO 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. Read the article >> Student nurse recalls horror of Okinawa fighting By SETSUKO KAMIYA Hideko Yoshimura was 19 and in high school in Okinawa when she was drafted as a student nurse in March 1945. She had no doubt that serving her country was the right thing to do. Read the article >> A long life of peace that sprung from war By SAYURI DAIMON 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? Read the article >> Vivisectionist recalls his day of reckoning By JUN HONGO 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. Read the article >> 'IT'S PLAIN MADNESS' The horror of war cannot be forgotten By KAHO SHIMIZU Shuichi Maeda worries about what will happen to society when elderly people who know firsthand the fear of war are gone. Read the article >> Hellcat bent for leather — a navy flyboy's tale By ERIC L. DUE 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. Read the article >> Veteran navy officer keeps an open mind By JUN HONGO 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. Read the article >> Nemuro raid survivor longs for homeland By KANAKO TAKAHARA 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. Read the article >> Vet blames those on high for war's sins, delusions By JUN HONGO 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 "frank man who looked like any other grandfather in the neighborhood," Iida recalled, although Matsui, then 64, had already commanded the Shanghai Expeditionary Forces in Nanjing. Read the article >> Censors unable to hide defeat: China escapee By SETSUKO KAMIYA 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 to Fukushima Prefecture to join relatives. During their journey, the 33-year-old Sohma and her children, aged 5, 4, 2 and 6 months, had a hard time finding food and places to sleep. But with the help of people along the way, the family safely reached their destination after 10 days. Read the article >> Spared Korean war criminal pursues redress By AKEMI NAKAMURA 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 were forced to build the infamous Death Railway to their last breath. Lee had been specifically accused by nine ex-POWs of collaborating with the Japanese military in forcing sick prisoners to build the Thai-Burma railway until many died. Read the article >> Journalism in the service of war authority By SETSUKO KAMIYA Kanji Murakami began his reporting career in January 1941, joining the Asahi Shimbun's bureau in Seoul, or Keijo as it was then known, when the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. At that time media censorship was strong. A 1909 law imposed many restrictions and curbed freedom of speech. Every newspaper was loyal to the Imperial government, which urged the nation to sacrifice for victory. Read the article >> 'War orphan' recounts feeling of abandonment By AKEMI NAKAMURA It was a rainy day in mid-August 1945. World War II was about to draw to a close, but nobody in the tiny Chinese village knew it. All they knew was that chaos was breaking out, and that the Russian military was approaching from the north. Noriko Suzuki was among some 600 Japanese sent to northeast China, in the region historically known as Manchuria, under a colonial government program for settling the region. That plan was clearly falling apart. Read the article >> Surrender spared a young, doubting kamikaze By ERIC PRIDEAUX If Masamichi Shida, 80, had known a bit more about the world back in 1942, he might never have become a kamikaze. But Shida was just an impressionable junior high school kid when he took the first step toward becoming a warrior for the Emperor. Read the article >>