Famed novelist Katsumoto Saotome dies at 90

TOKYO >> Katsumoto Saotome, a novelist who lived through the brutal American firebombing of Tokyo during World War II and worked relentlessly to preserve the memories of survivors in published accounts and at a museum he founded, died Tuesday in Saitama, Japan, a suburb of Tokyo. He was 90.

His daughter, Ai Saotome, confirmed the death. She said he had been hospitalized with pneumonia last fall.

Saotome (pronounced SAH-oh-toe-meh) spent more than half a century amassing the stories of survivors, some of whom were initially reluctant to share their recollections.

Plunging into the complicated politics of war remembrance, he pushed the Japanese government — without much success — to memorialize the estimated 100,000 people who were killed in the attack, which is far overshadowed by the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any accounting of the war in Japan.

“Some people would say, `Even if I talk about it, you can never bring back my loved ones,' “Saotome, who was 12 at the time of the firebombing, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2020. “But I said, `If you do not talk about it, we cannot preserve your memories.'”

Saotome's first volume of survivors stories, which he published in 1971 and modeled on John Hersey's famous account in The New Yorker of the bombing of Hiroshima, has sold more than 550,000 copies. The memorial museum he founded, in eastern Tokyo, was built with private funds because he was never able to secure government support.

In his efforts to chronicle the memories of the victims of the attack, which occurred March 10, 1945, and in which fleets of U.S. B-29s deployed napalm on a mostly civilian population, Saotome never tried to exonerate Japan for its culpability in the war.

“The United States should also bear responsibility,” he told The Times, “but first of all the Japanese government should be responsible for starting the war.”

Saotome traveled extensively, giving lectures and meeting with survivors of war bombings in other countries, including Britain, Germany, Italy and

China.

Hiroshi Suenaga, a survivor of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki who accompanied Saotome on these trips, including a visit to the home of a Chinese man who had been forced to work in coal mines in Hokkaido during the war, said that Saotome was “very soft and calm on the surface, but he had an unbending spirit inside of him.”

In addition to his volumes of survivor stories, Saotome wrote an account of a U.S. B-29 pilot whose plane crashed in Tokyo and who was taken prisoner, as well as multiple novels and children's books on the subject of war.

As a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing, he was outspoken in protesting all wars. As recently as April, he had written a message for an audience that had gathered outside Tokyo to view a movie based on one of his novels, “War and Youth,” about a woman's search for her child, who had gone missing during the war.

In the message, read by his daughter, Saotome expressed disappointment in Russia's invasion of Ukraine and said that seeing news footage of women and children trying to escape the war reminded him of the Japanese victims in Tokyo 77 years ago.

“I feel like I am seeing scenes of many Japanese people wandering around trying to escape just in front of my eyes,” he said.

Katsumoto Saotome was born March 26, 1932, in Tokyo, the youngest of Katsuma and Rin Saotome's four children. The family lived in the eastern part of the city, known as shitamachi, or “low town,” a series of neighborhoods where the poorest residents concentrated. His mother was a seamstress, and his father worked as, among other things, a barber, a street vendor and a theater promoter.

On the night of the firebombing, Saotome's family, grown complacent by frequent raids, had not sought shelter. His mother and sisters were at home in their wooden house; his father was out conducting fire patrols. As the B-29s flew in, igniting massive fires across the neighborhood, the family realized they needed to evacuate.

Saotome remembered pushing a handcart through the streets and dodging flames as thousands of residents tried desperately to escape. In the morning, he saw charred bodies piled on the riverbanks.