years older than I am—he has felt guilty that he was not in Tokyo to help her. Perhaps this affected the novel.
“My own experiences,” said Mr. Yazaki, “were different, but there are some points of similarity, as you’ll see.
“The normal Japanese school year starts in April, but 1944 was not normal, and after only a month my class was evacuated from Tokyo, the whole sixth grade, to Nagaoka.
“Was I afraid? Not at all. I was about Charley’s age. I was with my teachers, classmates, all my bestfriends. We were living in a Buddhist temple. And perhaps you don’t know this, Carey-san, but in Japanese culture, a temple or shrine is considered a sanctuary for children. No one bothered with air-raid drills. Why would we have needed them?
“It was one of those perfect summer days right at the end of the rainy season. We swam in the river and chased dragonflies. Back at the temple, we had our dinner and then a bath and we were just getting down to our homework when the first bomb dropped. It wasn’t like you think—no whistle, no big bang, just a noise like very heavy rain. You were talking about Grave of the Fireflies . Well, it was like that. These were incendiary bombs, and suddenly the whole world caught on fire.
“Though we had no training, we were like schoolchildren on a class trip. We behaved like a class, and this is why we had no injuries or loss of life. There were five adults with us, and they led us out of the temple and up the hill. We looked back down and saw our temple burning, all the houses around it too.
“We stayed shivering in the woods all that night, and when it got light we stayed there, waiting for the fires to stop. We were hungry, but when we came out of the forest there was nothing left, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep. There was nothing to do but go back to Tokyo.
“I often think: If we had not been bombed, wewould have lived in Nagaoka all through the war; I would never have experienced the Tokyo bombing on March 10 the following year. A third of the children I knew were killed, but they would still be alive.
“I came home to Setagaya-ku—that’s in the Yamanote district, in the southwest of Tokyo. My mother was living there, also my younger sister, and my father, who was never conscripted by the military. He was a publisher, and his company had been ordered to produce reading material for the armed forces.
“No, he wasn’t involved in manga, although it’s true that manga was used as propaganda by the army.
“Now that I was home, I could go back to my original school, but all my old teachers were in the army. As a matter of fact, I didn’t go to school too often. Everyone was expecting a big air raid on Tokyo. I was often told it was too dangerous to use the train. The Americans had retaken Saipan and Guam, so they no longer needed aircraft carriers to launch attacks on our country Their air supremacy was complete.
“You might think I had some happy moments in all of this. I was only twelve years old, after all, but you have to remember I had already been bombed once. What I remember is that we had lots of air-raid training. It was a tense, anxious time. Whensirens went off in the middle of the night, we would rush into the shelter in our backyard.
“There were plenty of air raids during the next nine months, all targeted at bases and ordnance factories. But then, on March 10, the Americans decided to bomb Shitamachi. You know what I mean? Downtown, where you are staying now. Asakusa, Ueno, the working-class area of Tokyo—also the most densely populated. The houses in Shitamachi were very close together, the families big.
“The bombing began at eight o’clock at night. And although it was quite a distance away from us, the noise was enormous and the sky was red all night.
“We lived in a traditional two-storey Japanese house with a tiled roof and drainpipes, so it was no great difficulty for me and my friends to climb up the drainpipe and sit on the roof—and from there
“My own experiences,” said Mr. Yazaki, “were different, but there are some points of similarity, as you’ll see.
“The normal Japanese school year starts in April, but 1944 was not normal, and after only a month my class was evacuated from Tokyo, the whole sixth grade, to Nagaoka.
“Was I afraid? Not at all. I was about Charley’s age. I was with my teachers, classmates, all my bestfriends. We were living in a Buddhist temple. And perhaps you don’t know this, Carey-san, but in Japanese culture, a temple or shrine is considered a sanctuary for children. No one bothered with air-raid drills. Why would we have needed them?
“It was one of those perfect summer days right at the end of the rainy season. We swam in the river and chased dragonflies. Back at the temple, we had our dinner and then a bath and we were just getting down to our homework when the first bomb dropped. It wasn’t like you think—no whistle, no big bang, just a noise like very heavy rain. You were talking about Grave of the Fireflies . Well, it was like that. These were incendiary bombs, and suddenly the whole world caught on fire.
“Though we had no training, we were like schoolchildren on a class trip. We behaved like a class, and this is why we had no injuries or loss of life. There were five adults with us, and they led us out of the temple and up the hill. We looked back down and saw our temple burning, all the houses around it too.
“We stayed shivering in the woods all that night, and when it got light we stayed there, waiting for the fires to stop. We were hungry, but when we came out of the forest there was nothing left, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep. There was nothing to do but go back to Tokyo.
“I often think: If we had not been bombed, wewould have lived in Nagaoka all through the war; I would never have experienced the Tokyo bombing on March 10 the following year. A third of the children I knew were killed, but they would still be alive.
“I came home to Setagaya-ku—that’s in the Yamanote district, in the southwest of Tokyo. My mother was living there, also my younger sister, and my father, who was never conscripted by the military. He was a publisher, and his company had been ordered to produce reading material for the armed forces.
“No, he wasn’t involved in manga, although it’s true that manga was used as propaganda by the army.
“Now that I was home, I could go back to my original school, but all my old teachers were in the army. As a matter of fact, I didn’t go to school too often. Everyone was expecting a big air raid on Tokyo. I was often told it was too dangerous to use the train. The Americans had retaken Saipan and Guam, so they no longer needed aircraft carriers to launch attacks on our country Their air supremacy was complete.
“You might think I had some happy moments in all of this. I was only twelve years old, after all, but you have to remember I had already been bombed once. What I remember is that we had lots of air-raid training. It was a tense, anxious time. Whensirens went off in the middle of the night, we would rush into the shelter in our backyard.
“There were plenty of air raids during the next nine months, all targeted at bases and ordnance factories. But then, on March 10, the Americans decided to bomb Shitamachi. You know what I mean? Downtown, where you are staying now. Asakusa, Ueno, the working-class area of Tokyo—also the most densely populated. The houses in Shitamachi were very close together, the families big.
“The bombing began at eight o’clock at night. And although it was quite a distance away from us, the noise was enormous and the sky was red all night.
“We lived in a traditional two-storey Japanese house with a tiled roof and drainpipes, so it was no great difficulty for me and my friends to climb up the drainpipe and sit on the roof—and from there
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