Tokyo bombing survivor fears Japan might be marching towards war again

Katsumoto Saotome was 12 the night he ran for his life through a sea of flames, jumping over smouldering railroad ties along a train track as US B-29 bombers rained incendiary bombs down around him.

The US bombing after midnight on March 10, 1945, annihilated a wide swathe of northeastern Tokyo, packed with small factories and houses made of wood and paper.

An estimated 100,000 people were killed, many of them women and children - a toll higher than those of the Dresden fire bombing and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now, as memories fade of how civilians suffered during the second world war - suffering Saotome blames Japan's wartime leaders who thought of their citizens as "weeds" - the 82-year-old author fears Japan may be marching towards war again.

"I think we're turning backwards, down that road," said Saotome, citing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's plans to change Japan's war-renouncing constitution, his more muscular security stance and a state secrets act that was passed last year.

"Everyone thinks at first that it's nothing, but more and more things accumulate, and then it's repression. I worry about what happens to women and children in this situation. We have to talk about it, maybe that will put a brake on things," he said.

For Saotome and others of his age, the war stole their childhood. In school, before being conscripted to work in factories, they learned that the "kamikaze" divine wind would annihilate Japan's enemies. Should Japan lose, they would have to choose death over dishonour and kill themselves.