In the late 1990s I sat in an old house in Yokkaichi City, Mie Prefecture, Japan, talking to an elderly man who had been a part of the civil defense effort duri

In the late 1990s I sat in an old house in Yokkaichi City, Mie Prefecture, Japan, talking to an elderly man who had been a part of the civil defense effort during the last year of World War II. He said that he remembered being outside when bombings were starting, and seeing large dust clouds in the distance, making their way toward the city. One night the city caught fire (it was firebombed in addition to the normal bombings) and he and his wife, both in their 20s, ran outside into the street and covered themselves with their futon mattresses as means of protective cover. The next morning they arose to find their neighborhood severely burned, and the outsides of their mattresses even partially charred. Later I talked to another man who grew up near Nagoya--he used to love watching the bombings so much that he and his friends would sneak out of their bomb shelters and lay in the rice paddies watching them fly over. They would laugh and shout, "bii ni-jyu kyu!" (B-29!) They'd ooh and ahh as they watched flares drop. Hearing stories like these really made me realize what a complex and nuanced world we live in. Edit: I didn't realize this, but apparently "pumpkin bombs" were dropped on Yokkaichi City in preparation for the atomic bombing of Japan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpkin_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpkin_bomb