Hiroshi Suenaga, a survivor of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki who accompanied Mr. Saotome on these trips, including a visit to the home of a Chinese man who was forced to work in coal mines in Hokkaido during the war, said in an interview that Mr. Saotome was “very gentle and calm on the surface, but he had an unbending spirit in him.”
In addition to his collections of survivor stories, Mr. Saotome wrote an account of an American B-29 pilot whose plane crashed in Tokyo and was captured, as well as several novels and children’s books on the subject of war.
A survivor of the Tokyo firebombing, he was outspoken in protesting all wars. As late as April, he had written a message to an audience gathered outside of Tokyo to see a film based on one of his novels, “War and Youth,” about a woman’s search for her child, which went missing during the war. †
In the message, read by his daughter, Mr Saotome expressed disappointment at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and said seeing news footage of women and children trying to escape the war reminded him of the Japanese victims in Tokyo. year ago. “I feel like I’m seeing scenes in front of my eyes of many Japanese wandering around and trying to escape,” he said.
Katsumoto Saotome was born on March 26, 1932 in Tokyo, the youngest of four children born to Katsuma and Rin Saotome. 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 a hairdresser, street vendor and theater promoter.
When war broke out, Mr. Saotome’s older brother was enlisted, but his father, an alcoholic, was deemed too weak to enlist as a soldier. His two older sisters worked in a factory.
