A Bomb Exploded

A bomb exploded in the neighborhood. It was a fine April morning in 1942. The blast was shattering; the whole house shook. As a nine-year old, I thought I was deafened and blinded momentarily. It took only a few seconds to realize that I was alive and so were Mother and my sister two years younger. Father was already away in Singapore.

Air raid warning was in effect for a few hours that pleasant morning, but as best as I could remember it was only another practice warning. Shortly after 12:00 noon, we heard the All Clear siren. So, the three of us sat down for lunch. Right at that moment there was the blast and the earth shook and appeared to collapse. After that it was all quiet. The blast was nothing like an earthquake tremor -- even the very intense kind; we knew those well. This was a detonation though I had no idea what it was; I didn't even know the word. It was a completely new experience.

Four months had passed since the outbreak of the war, and the radio fed us news of Japan's continuing victory overseas. As we ate, we wondered what the blast was. We said it was perhaps an explosion at an armory somewhere; but we also thought we saw the shadow of a huge plane flying low over the house; but the idea of an enemy plane flying over Tokyo was simply unreal.

But that was what it was. We learned later in the afternoon, that American planes flew over Tokyo and bombed the city. We figured that the plane that came our way targeted the Yoyogi military training ground, north of the residential area, Aoyama, where our house stood. Either the bomber missed the target badly or, more likely, it dropped one left-over bomb on the way back from the mission. I never knew the extent of the damage it caused. I only know that it did not close enough to decimate us.

But we also learned that afternoon that a five-year old boy, returning from a friend's house minutes after the All Clear siren, was found dead up on a branch of a huge tree.

The blast was a tremendous shock; but in retrospect it was only a firecracker. Before long, Tokyo was subjected to massive air raids that made bomb blasts a routine event and severed body parts strewn on sidewalks a common sight. As a child, I was spared from seeing them in the flesh; but I heard enough about them. Later, the city lay in conflagration under the nightly raids of incendiary bombs that unbundled in midair like fireworks out of control and came down with an ominous hissing sound. Eventually we were evacuate and took refuge in a remote village, where we were safe but starved from shortage of food.

In 1952, after finishing high school, I sailed to California. It was not until 1970 that I learned about the first air raid over Tokyo. John Toland's book, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945 came out in that year, and I read it with interest. In it, I read that on April 18, 1942, at dawn, sixteen B-25 bombers, each with four 500-lb bombs, flew from the aircraft carrier Hornet and reached Japan's mainland and accomplished the very first air raid of Tokyo virtually unsuspected by the Japanese military. Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle commanded the mission.

So, that was it. The blast struck terror. But we were evidently well outside the damage radius of 450 meters or 1500 feet where the bomb fell. So, our house did not collapse -- for the time being; but I was awakened with a jolt to the reality of the war.