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Posted on Instapundit’s Open Thread last night.

Long but worth the read:

This kind of reads like a Paul Harvey story.

The History Vault

The year is 1962, and a 50-year-old Japanese man named Nobuo Fujita sits nervously on a flight bound for the United States.
In his checked luggage lies a 400-year-old samurai sword.
It has been handed down through his family for generations.
But Fujita isn’t bringing it as a gift.
He is bringing it to kill himself.
Fujita has been invited to the small, coastal logging town of Brookings, Oregon.
The town is hosting its annual Azalea Festival, and the local Jaycees decided to invite a very specific guest of honor.
When the formal invitation arrived in Japan, the Japanese government urged Fujita not to go.
They warned him it was a massive trap.
They told him the Americans were going to publicly humiliate him, put him on trial, or worse.
Even his own family begged him to stay home.
Fujita decided to go anyway.
But as a man of deep traditional honor, he made a silent, terrifying vow.
If the townspeople of Brookings hurled stones at him, or if they tried to lynch him, he would draw his family’s ancestral blade.
He would commit seppuku—ritual suicide—right there on American soil.
He felt he owed them a blood debt.
Because twenty years earlier, Nobuo Fujita had done something no one else in the history of the world had ever done.
He had bombed the continental United States.
Let’s rewind to September 9, 1942.
Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita is a pilot in the Imperial Japanese Navy.
But he doesn’t fly from a traditional aircraft carrier.
He flies from a submarine.
Just before dawn, the massive Japanese submarine I-25 surfaces quietly off the coast of Oregon.
The ocean is pitch black, and the crew works in absolute silence.
They quickly assemble a small, canvas-winged Yokosuka E14Y floatplane right on the wet deck of the sub.
Fujita climbs into the tiny cockpit.
His mission is highly experimental and entirely unprecedented.
Bolted to the wings of his plane are two 168-pound incendiary bombs.
The plan is to fly over the dense, dry timber of the Siskiyou National Forest and drop the explosives.
The Japanese high command believes this will spark a massive inferno along the American coast.
They hope a raging mega-fire will terrify the public and force the United States to pull its naval fleet away from the Pacific theater.
Fujita catapults off the submarine and vanishes into the thick morning fog.
He navigates blindly for fifty miles, crossing the American coastline.
When he reaches the dense evergreen canopy of Mount Emily, he pulls the release lever.
The heavy bombs plummet into the trees below.
Fujita watches as blinding flashes of light erupt in the dark, silent forest.
He turns his small plane around, escapes back to the waiting submarine, and the crew sinks beneath the waves before American coastal patrols can spot them.
He has successfully executed the only aerial bombing of the U.S. mainland by an enemy aircraft.
But the grand master plan fails.
Oregon had experienced unusually heavy rain the night before.
The forest is damp, and the massive, apocalyptic inferno never materializes.
A lone U.S. Forest Service lookout named Howard Gardner spots the smoke from a fire tower.
Gardner hikes to the site and quickly extinguishes the small flames.
The physical damage to the United States is practically zero.
But the psychological weight of that single morning will haunt Nobuo Fujita for the next two decades.
Now, it is 1962.
Fujita steps off the plane in the United States.
He takes the long drive up the winding Oregon coast toward Brookings.
His stomach is in knots.
He keeps his hand near the luggage containing his 400-year-old sword.
He expects angry mobs.
He expects picket signs demanding his execution.
His heart races as the car finally pulls into the small town limits of Brookings.
And then, Fujita freezes.
There are people lining the streets.
Hundreds of them.
But they aren’t holding pitchforks or throwing stones.
They are holding up American and Japanese flags.
They are smiling.
They are cheering for him.
The mayor of Brookings steps forward and extends his hand.
He welcomes Fujita not as an enemy war criminal, but as an honored guest.
Fujita is completely overwhelmed.
The harsh, violent reception he prepared for does not exist.
Instead, he finds a community offering him unconditional grace.
During the town’s festival, Fujita asks for a moment to speak to the crowd.
He steps onto the stage, trembling.
He has brought the 400-year-old samurai sword with him.
But he does not draw it to end his life.
With tears streaming down his face, he carefully hands the ancestral blade to the mayor of Brookings.
It is the most prized possession his family owns, a relic passed down for four centuries.
He surrenders it as a formal apology for his actions during the war.
“This is the finest sword I own,” Fujita tells the stunned crowd through an interpreter.
“I give it to you in the spirit of peace and friendship.”
The town accepts it.
And in that single, incredibly vulnerable moment, a fifty-year healing process begins.
Fujita does not just visit Brookings once.
Over the next three decades, he returns again and again.
He comes to consider the small American logging town his second home.
When he learns that the local Brookings library is struggling financially, he feels compelled to help.
He quietly donates thousands of dollars of his own money to buy children’s books about international peace.
Later, he pays for a group of local high school students from Brookings to visit Japan.
He wants them to experience his culture, to ensure the next generation sees each other as friends, not enemies.
In 1992, exactly fifty years to the week that he dropped bombs on their forest, the town of Brookings does something extraordinary.
They officially vote to make Nobuo Fujita an honorary citizen of their town.
During this visit, Fujita hikes back up Mount Emily.
He plants a redwood tree at the exact site where his bombs fell.
It is a living, breathing monument to forgiveness, growing out of the same soil he once tried to destroy.
When Fujita passes away in 1997 at the age of 85, he makes one final, incredibly poignant request.
He does not want to be laid to rest entirely in his homeland.
In October 1998, his daughter travels across the Pacific Ocean one last time.
She hikes up Mount Emily, deep into the Siskiyou National Forest.
She stands by the redwood tree her father planted.
And she scatters a portion of his ashes at the bomb site.
The only man to ever strike the U.S. mainland from the air didn’t conquer America with fire, but was conquered by its forgiveness.
Sources: National WWII Museum / Oregon Historical Society
#history #knowledge #worldwar2 #historyfacts
Sources: National WWII Museum / Oregon Historical Society
#history #knowledge #worldwar2 #historyfacts