The cover of a commemorative booklet on the use of washi paper for Japan's World War II balloon bombs is seen in this photo taken in the city of Fukushima, on Aug. 13, 2021. (Mainichi/Naohiro Koenuma)

       FUKUSHIMA -- After over 20 years researching traditional local washi paper's use in balloon bombs, a retired post office worker has finished a commemorative booklet on the weapons Japan launched to attack United States soil toward the end of World War II.

       Katsuni Anzai, 84, of the Fukushima Prefecture city of Nihonmatsu, compiled his research into the booklet this past May. More than 9,000 balloon bombs are believed to have been launched from Japan at the end of the war to hit U.S. soil. After learning that Kamikawasaki washi paper -- his home village's traditional local craft -- was provided to the Japanese military, Anzai began investigating the connection between the paper and balloon bombs.

       Anzai was born in 1936 as the second son of a farming family in the village of Kamikawasaki, now part of the city of Nihonmatsu. The Second Sino-Japanese War broke out the following year, but the farming community he called home remained calm.

       "Air raid sirens would go off every now and then, but my friends and I would just stare up curiously at the bombers flying above," Anzai recalled.

       Late at night on July 12, 1945, just about a month before the war ended, the young Anzai was woken by the sound of bombing. It was so late and dark that he didn't know what was going on. After dawn, he learned that a bomb fell just 200 meters from the home where his family of seven was sleeping.

       According to historical records of the prefecture's neighboring Adachi district, some 100 incendiary shells were dropped on Kamikawasaki by U.S. military B-29 bombers believed to have flown from Tinian, one of today's Northern Mariana Islands, where Saipan is located.

       Katsuni Anzai is seen during an interview in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, on Aug. 12, 2021. (Mainichi/Naohiro Koenuma)

       The event is now known as the Kamikawasaki air raid. While two houses burned down in the bombing, no injuries were reported. Local records give only a few lines to the raid, and there is no mention of possible reasons why the village was targeted.

       Anzai was 8 when the bombing happened and never knew why a peaceful farming village with no military factories like Kamikawasaki was attacked. Locals apparently didn't think much of it either, and assumed U.S. military mistook the location for the city of Fukushima.

       Anzai graduated from a local high school and took over the family farming business before going to work at the post office. In around 1995, with mandatory retirement approaching, he visited the Edo-Tokyo Museum in the capital's Sumida Ward. There, he saw a replica of a balloon bomb made with washi paper. A suspicion that had stayed with him since his youth resurfaced, and as he looked at it he wondered if Kamikawasaki's washi was used for bombs like the one he was seeing.

       Anzai then began his research by making inquiries for the U.S. military's tactical mission report on the day his home village was bombed, and read through historical records released by local governments.

       Handmade washi making in Kamikawasaki has a history going back over 1,000 years. Some 70% of its 530 households were involved in washi manufacturing during the war. An interview with a related party revealed the Fukushima prefectural handmade washi industry association was commissioned to produce paper for military purposes in 1941. Kamikawasaki as a whole reportedly provided 400,000 pieces, or 80% of the association's supply, to the Imperial Japanese Navy's first ammunitions arsenal located in what is now the Miyagi Prefecture town of Shibata.

       An account in the Fukushima Prefecture city of Sukagawa's historical records says that some 150 students at a wartime grade school were mobilized to washi paper gluing work -- the balloon bomb making process's first step. Furthermore, an Edo-Tokyo Museum exhibition suggested balloon bombs were released from today's Nakoso district in the Fukushima prefectural city of Iwaki. Anzai thinks it is highly likely the Kamikawasaki washi paper was used to make the bombs.

       "I always thought Kamikawasaki was a victim in the air raid, but we might have unknowingly been the aggressor," Anzai says. He worked alone to unearth buried history as the generations that experienced the war firsthand are gradually disappearing.

       (Japanese original by Naohiro Koenuma, Fukushima Bureau)

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