Skip to content

22nd July, 1945

Sights in the mountain resort of Gora:

A Japanese sporting a buckle labeled “Philippine Commonwealth”;

A Japanese boy playing with a model airplane but this one carried an American star on its wings instead of the Japanese sun;

A rickety brown inn along a rocky slope, full of school-children evacuated from Tokyo and Yokohama. The parents of two-thirds of them had perished in the last air-raids. Somehow the teachers had broken the news to their charges after many days of troubled apprehension. Perhaps the orphans wept that day and perhaps they still do it at nights but when I passed by, they were laughing and chasing one another in the chill sunlight.