The 9-year-old girl could not believe her eyes.

When she arrived at Tokyo’s Ueno Station on a night train after being evacuated, the nation’s capital lay before her as a scorched wasteland.

Everyone was blackened, their clothing in tatters, and they wore “faces that didn’t seem human.”

The girl saw the gruesome scene on the morning of March 10, 1945, exactly 79 years ago.

In the early hours of that day, 279 B-29 bombers attacked Tokyo’s “shitamachi,” or the eastern, low-lying and more working-class areas of the Japanese capital, dropping more than 300,000 incendiary bombs.

The firestorm caused by the weapons designed to start fires killed more than 100,000 people.

Why did the U.S. military commit such a cruel and inhuman act of killing? No justifications are convincing.

The girl lost her 35-year-old mother, her 14-year-old sister and her 7-year-old sister in the Great Tokyo Air Raid that day.

Her father had passed away earlier.

Left alone, she was taken in by relatives, but she had to endure days filled with grief and pain.

“If only she had died with her parents.”

The whispered conversations of her foster parents pierced her heart.

Even as an adult, she lived hiding the fact that she was an orphan.

Every March, she would get headaches and be weighed down by grief.

After marrying and having children, she was haunted by nightmares of her family dying in a house fire.

The government of this country has been cold to such war orphans. For many years after the war, it neither investigated the number nor the names of those killed in the air raids.

To this day, no compensation has been offered to the families of the victims.

“They say it was a war to protect the lives of citizens, but we feel abandoned by our country,” the orphan said.

On this day, we feel compelled to note that the war produced many orphans.

The girl’s name was Mari Kaneda. She served as the representative of an association for war orphans and passed away on July 10 last year at the age of 88.

--The Asahi Shimbun, March 10

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.