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By Root 969 0

people. Clay tiles flew past, glowing fiercely. People were running, running—then burning, burning. Wide-eyed, Haruyo saw mothers in flight, apparently oblivious of the fact that the babies on their backs, the children whose hands they grasped, were on fire. The great flight of people seemed impelled by the gale, rather than by their own limbs. The Wadas seized their daughters tightly, and led them a few yards to a nearby railway embankment. They clambered up onto the tracks, and stood among thousands of others, in temporary safety. Almost all were too stunned to speak, as fire swept through the nearby houses, including their own.

For Yoshiko Hashimoto’s family, living in the Sumida district of east Tokyo, until that night awareness of bombing had been slight. They felt no great fear in the face of spasmodic raids from small numbers of planes, which they described sardonically as “our regulars.” “There was a strange feeling of detachment until the March raid,” said Yoshiko, the twenty-four-year-old mother of a three-month-old baby boy, Hiroshi. “Even if someone quite close by got hit, you never thought it would happen to you.” The family’s principal concession to air-raid precautions was that they always slept in their clothes, and kept by the beds a furoshiki—a cloth square—with a few necessaries for parents and children tied up in it, together with baskets containing some clothes and a little food.

When the bombs began to fall on 9 March, at first only Yoshiko, her mother and the baby took to their shelter. Very quickly, amid the thunder and tumult of explosions, they understood that what was happening was on a scale beyond their experience or imagination. Their father called down to the shelter for the women to come out. He realised that a hole barely three feet below ground offered negligible protection. They emerged into a sea of flame. Yoshiko, clutching her baby, ran with her sister Chieko to the water tank a few yards beyond the house. Showers of incendiaries were falling around them. The sky over the city was a deep, cruel red. They piled their most precious possessions, above all bedding, onto a little cart. The girls’ father shouted that they must flee before the approaching flames.

Thousands of people “almost mad with terror” thronged the streets. The Hashimotos had not gone far before they discovered that Chieko, pushing their cart, was falling behind. The little family saw that they were beside a railway. “We’ve got to go on,” cried their father. “The line will be a target for the planes.” He and his wife each clutched one of Etsuko’s hands. Yoshiko, the baby on her back, tried to keep hold of fourteen-year-old Hisae. However, the child was encumbered by a cooking pot full of precious rice. In the desperate, pressing throng, the two girls found themselves dashed apart. “Wait for me! Wait for me!” cried Hisae. Then her plaintive voice faded. As the mob surged on towards the Sanno Bridge over the Tate River, Yoshiko lost her sister.

At the riverbank the Hashimoto family paused, desperate to recover their two missing daughters. But now the fires were upon them. A blast of unbearable heat overtook the fugitives. Flames seized baggage, nearby warehouses, then the heads of the terrified fugitives. Yoshiko saw people shrivelled by fire “like dead leaves,” others holding up hands that were ablaze. On Yoshiko’s back, the baby Hiroshi was screaming. Flaming fragments blew into the child’s mouth. “Get him off your back! Get him down!” cried Yoshiko’s mother. The girl took the boy in her arms, plucked a glowing ember from his lips, then sought to shield him from the flames and the terrible wall of heat. Her mother took off the hood covering her own head and put it on her daughter’s, some of whose hair was already burned away. On the bridge, the panic-stricken crowd fleeing towards Fukagawa on the south bank came face to face with another mob seeking to escape fires on their own side. The two masses of people collided, creating new scenes of horror. “I watched people die before my eyes. I saw people burning.”

“Jump