Nobuo Fujita, 85, Is Dead; Only
Foe to Bomb America
Nobuo Fujita, a Japanese pilot who flew bombing runs over
Oregon in 1942, apparently the only time that an enemy aircraft has ever bombed
the American mainland, died on Tuesday at a hospital near Tokyo. He was 85.
The cause was lung cancer, family members said.
Mr. Fujita, whose incendiary bombs set off forest fires
in Oregon's coastal range, played the key role in a quixotic plan by Japanese
military commanders to put pressure on America's home turf in World War II. The
idea was that the United States Navy would then be obliged to retreat from the
Pacific to protect the West Coast.
A quiet, humble man who in his later years was deeply
ashamed of his air raids on the United States, Mr. Fujita eventually forged a
remarkable bond of friendship with the people of Brookings, the small logging
town whose surrounding forests he had bombed. Last week, as he lay dying, the
town council of Brookings hailed Mr. Fujita an ''ambassador of good will'' and
proclaimed him an ''honorary citizen'' of the town.
On his first postwar visit to Brookings in 1962, Mr.
Fujita carried with him a 400-year-old samurai sword that had been handed down
in his family from generation to generation. He presented the sword, which he
had carried with him throughout the war, to Brookings as a symbol of his
regret, and it now hangs in the local library.
Mr. Fujita's daughter, Yoriko Asakura, said today that
there was a bit more to the story. She recalled that her father had been very
anxious before that visit, fretting about whether Oregonians would be angry at
him for the bombing, and so he had decided to carry the sword so that if
necessary he could appease their fury by committing ritual suicide,
disemboweling himself with the sword in the traditional Japanese method known
as seppuku.
''He thought perhaps people would still be angry and
would throw eggs at him,'' Mrs. Asakura recalled, adding that ''if that
happened, as a Japanese, he wanted to take responsibility for what he had
done'' by committing seppuku.
Mr. Fujita's grandson, Fumihiro Asakura, said his
grandfather had been deeply moved that the people of Brookings treated him
hospitably, showering him with affection and respect that he felt he did not
deserve. From this remarkable mutual magnanimity, Mr. Fujita began the
metamorphosis from an enemy bomber of Brookings to its honorary citizen.
Brookings is a remote town of 5,400 on the southern
Oregon coast, focused on logging and farming, but it now has an excellent
selection of Japan books in its local library.
''He gave $1,000 to the library to purchase books about
Japan for children, so that there wouldn't be another war between the United
States and Japan,'' Nancy Brendlinger, the Mayor of Brookings, said by
telephone. ''He was always very humble and always promoting the idea of peace
between the United States and Japan.''
Churches and businesses in Brookings contributed $3,000
to pay for Mr. Fujita's trip to Oregon in 1962, and when he could afford to, he
responded by paying for several local people to visit Japan. He also made three
more visits to Brookings over the years, planting trees to mark the spot where
he dropped the bombs and taking part in a 1994 ceremony to dedicate a state
historical marker near the site.
In the war, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, of
course, and even bombed some islands off Alaska. But the air raids on Oregon
were the only attacks by Japanese airplanes on what were states at that time.
A submarine carrying a crew of about 100 and a small
plane with folded wings slipped across the Pacific to the unprotected waters
off the Oregon coast. In the predawn darkness of Sept. 9, 1942, the crew
assembled the plane and shot it into the air with a catapult. Mr. Fujita, who
was a warrant officer, oriented himself with the Cape Bianco lighthouse and
flew over the coastal range, dropping two 168-pound fire bombs over the forests
in the hope of setting terrible forest fires.
Mr. Fujita's plane had been spotted from the ground, but
no one had anything better to shoot at it with than a deer rifle, and so he
flew back to the submarine -- and was horrified to discover that it was not
there. He feared that it had been discovered and forced to leave him behind,
but he eventually found it and landed in the water on the plane's floats.
The submarine's crew members quickly stowed the plane and
dived to 250 feet, where they stayed quietly -- listening to American depth
charges -- as the United States Navy searched frantically for them.
Three weeks later, Mr. Fujita flew an almost identical
mission and dropped two more bombs. None of the bombings, on either mission,
caused much of a fire, but they did provoke alarm up and down the coast.
Although Mr. Fujita's were the only air raids on the
American mainland, Japan did release thousands of balloons carrying bombs. The
winds carried the balloons across the ocean to the western United States, where
they landed and set small fires. The only fatalities were a group of people on
a church outing in Oregon and perhaps a woman in Montana.
Mr. Fujita's air raid was regarded in Japan as heroic.
The main front-page article in the Asahi newspaper's evening edition on Sept.
17, 1942, carried a headline: ''Incendiary Bomb Dropped on Oregon State. First
Air Raid on Mainland America. Big Shock to Americans.''
After the war, Mr. Fujita started a hardware store in
Ibaraki Prefecture, near Tokyo, but it eventually went bankrupt. He later
worked at a company making wire, and he rarely talked of the war or of his
younger brother, who was killed in the fighting. Mr. Fujita's survivors -- in
addition to his daughter, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild -- do not
even know where the brother was killed.
His family members did not even know that he had bombed
Oregon until he abruptly announced in 1962 that he had been invited to
Brookings and would be going for a return visit -- with his sword, just in
case.
Photos: On a visit to Oregon, Nobuo Fujita showed his
samurai sword, which he did not need, by a memorial plaque. (The Curry Coastal
Pilot); Warrant Officer Fujita dropped bombs on Oregon forests in 1942.
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