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Kazutoshi Hanto, a writer who is a leading researcher on Showa history and is known for his works such as “The Longest Day in Japan” and “Nomonhan Summer”, will be at his home in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo on 12 January. died. He was 90 years old.
In “Bunchun Online”, in the summer of 2019, 74 years after the war, we conducted an interview about the “origin” of Mr. Hanto. What did Mr. Hanto think in front of the city that turned into a sea of fire after experiencing the Great Tokyo Air Raid as a child? I will republish the article at that time. (First published: August 15, 2019. Article titles, ages, etc. remain as they were at the time of publication)
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Kazutoshi Hanto, a 14-year-old who was once excited about the start of the Pacific War and believed in Japan’s victory and worked in a military factory, was shocked by the tragedy of the Great Tokyo Air Raid and “lost his humanity”. Five months later, Hanto will reach the end of the war, on August 15.
Later, in “Japan’s Longest Day”, Mr. Hanto, who was drawing 24 hours until noon on August 15, 1945, in central Japan, was still just a high school student at the time. .. What kind of day did “Hanto Shonen” have that day and what did he think? I heard “August 15” for Mr. Hanto.
Interview / Composition = Inaizumi Ren
(3rd of the 3 times / Continuation of # 1 and # 2)
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After the Great Tokyo Air Raid on March 9-10, I went to the high school I was attending after the fire died down. The munitions factory where he worked was burned, but there was an area along the Sumida River that didn’t burn, and Nananaka was just there.
Then the adult in the schoolyard told me that I had come to a good place. They handed him a military hand and put him on the truck saying: “I am going to clean the burn marks.”
Place the burned body in the truck bed.
When I went there, “cleaning the burn marks” was basically sorting the bodies. About 100,000 people were killed in this airstrike, but I didn’t expect many to be dead at the time. However, there were burned bodies everywhere and he was still in awe of them.
I kept putting the burned bodies in the totan and the truck bed with the adults, without emotions. However, when you start working, you will see unimaginable bodies one after another. When I put some people in the truck, an adult I couldn’t see said, “You should stop the children,” and I remember going back to my army and going home.
Maybe it was a guard or something. If you thought that letting a child do such a tragic task would be traumatic, you could say that it was the human heart that was barely left at the time.
There was a corpse storage area around the tree of heaven.
Regardless, the burn marks were already omnipresent. The collected bodies were lined up on school grounds and in small parks, and survivors walked in search of the bodies of their relatives. I haven’t seen it, but it seems the Kamedo stations were heaps of corpses. Also Fukagawa and Honjo. The top of the Sumida River Speech Bridge was also miserable. The area where the Sky Tree is now being built is exactly where the corpse was stored at the time.
There were also many people who jumped into the Sumida River and drowned. I heard that the bodies of the Kita-Juma River floated two years after the defeat. The exact number of deaths in the airstrike is unknown because some families have died. Of course, there were a lot of people who didn’t know their names, and I can only say that it was completely miserable.
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