Japanese writer who documented WWII Tokyo firebombing dies

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) — Katsumoto Saotome, a Japanese writer who gathered the accounts of survivors of the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo in World War II to raise awareness of the massive civilian deaths and the importance of peace, has died. He was 90. A native of Tokyo, Saotome was 12 when he narrowly survived the firebombing of the city on March 10, 1945, that turned its densely populated downtown area into an inferno. More than 105,000 people are estimated to have died and a million made homeless in a single night, but the devastation has been largely eclipsed in history by the U.S. atomic bombings of two Japanese cities several months later. Saotome wrote books and opened a museum about the firebombing.