This Scorching Earth by Donald Richie Page B

ambulances. They were full of wounded, lying there as though dead. Farther on, prisoners-of-war were clearing the smoking ruins. They wore red uniforms and carried blankets for the removal of the dead.
    Eventually he recognized the Susaki district. Yesterday it had been a pleasure center, with gayly-colored decorations, sidewalk stalls, girls peeping from behind lattice-work screens, and music. Now there was nothing. The houses, like the decorations, had been made only of wood and paper and had burned almost at once. Now in the early morning the district was very quiet, and no one moved.
    He turned back. The small bridges across the canals had been burned. He had to stay on the large island connected to Nihombashi by the bridge across the Sumida. He looked across the canals and saw people still alive on the little, smoking islands. They shouted and waved, but there was nothing he could do, so he went on. Some were swimming across to the large island. They had to push aside others who floated there face down.
    In a burned primary school he saw the bodies of children who had run there, to their teachers, for protection. Later he learned there had been two thousand dead children in that school alone. They lay face down on the scorched concrete floor, as though asleep. The kimonos of some still smoked. The teachers to whom they had fled lay among them.
    It Was past noon when, suddenly very tired, he walked back across the bridge, back past Shirokiya where only twenty-four hours before he had been eating noodles, buying his mother a present, stealing a look at his uniform in a mirror. He took a trolley to Shinagawa. It was almost night before he reached his uncle's house. The trolley stopped continually. It was filled with wounded, and others, less wounded, hung from the roof and the sides. He could have arrived sooner by walking, but there was a fascination in the macabre ride from which he could not tear himself away.
    At his uncle's house he found his brother and, surprisingly, his uncle. The latter's arm was badly burned, and he was wounded about the face and head. He had come home that afternoon, walking the entire distance. He told them about their family.
    They had been sitting around the table drinking beer, his sister and himself. The younger girls had already gone to bed, and his brother-in-law was at Susaki. He said that first the planes bombed the outskirts of Fukagawa and Honjo, then closed the circle, making it smaller and smaller. It was difficult to escape because it happened so swiftly. Almost instantly there was fire on all sides.
    By the time the air-raid sirens had begun they heard the explosions, and flames were leaping up in the distance. The airplanes wheeled over them, and the circle of fire was much nearer. They got the little girls up, but by the time they were dressed the fire was only a block away. They tried to escape from the lumberyard, but the little bridge which led to the Tokyo road was burning. So they climbed into the canal in back of the house.
    Sticks of bombs were dropping constantly, and finally one of them hit the house. The heat was terrible. Even the logs in the canal began to smoke. They watched the fire spread, in just a few seconds, to the storehouses and then to the entire island. Tadashi's mother and sisters held on to a log and began crying.
    Their uncle found a pan and dipped water over their heads and shoulders. The little fur hoods with cats embroidered on them helped protect the children for a while, but when the fur began smoking he tore off the hoods and poured water directly on their hair. The portion of the log above water cracked in the heat, but he kept on pouring water.
    There he remained until early morning. About one, the fires burning around them just as fiercely as before, he became very tired. He tried to get a better grip on the log but found his arm so burned that it stuck to the wood. He was unable both to hold up his sister and nieces and at the same time continue