Delivered before the Ninth Bomb Group Association, Dayton, Ohio,
October 15, 1988

I want to thank Maj. Gen. (retired) Earl Johnson for his kind introduction and for making it possible for me to appear before you. Earl Johnson happens to be a fellow alumnus of Wabash College, a graduate of the Class of 1938, and he noticed in the alumni bulletin a synopsis of a talk I gave at Wabash College in November of last year on the college's Career Day. In talking about why I wanted to get involved in international affairs as my career, I had recounted my boyhood experience of watching B29s drop bombs on us in Tokyo and Nagoya. Earl, I later learned, used to fly B29 bombing missions to Tokyo and Nagoya and mining missions over the Inland Sea of Japan from Tinian.

That video presentation on the B29s which we just saw was certainly very moving for me. It is a great honor and privilege for me to come here to be with you this evening. In fact, I had never imagined that I would get an opportunity to meet so many of you - I understand that there are 320 of you here - who participated in the B29 bombing missions to Japan, let alone have the opportunity to speak to you and tell you my side of the war story. I do appreciate very much your kind hospitality and invitation to speak to you this evening, along with Col. Paul Tibbets, the commander of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

You know, my family name, Goto, is spelled G-0-T-0, and when I went to Wabash College in Indiana, some of my classmates would call, "Hi, Goat" or even, "Hi, billy goat." I had long been associated with a tiny Japanese auto manufacturer called Nissan Motor Company, and around 1974, in the wake of the first energy crisis, Japanese cars started selling like hotcakes in this country. It touched off sort of a small trade war. Then I said to myself, "Maybe my first name ought to be 'Scape' instead of Mitsuya, so I could be 'Scape Goat.'" I talked to the then Tokyo bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, Mike Tharp, and he wrote all about me and my new nickname in an article that appeared on the front page in 1974. So since then, my first name has been "Scape," and if you would care to call me "Scape," I would be delighted.

It's not often that I see dreams. But of the dreams I do see, there are two kinds. One is the dream of seeing so many B29s in the air, just hundreds of them, dropping bombs on us. And the other dream I see is the dream of myself getting up to a podium like this one, being unable to speak a single word of English.

That reminds me of a story of a young Japanese boy who came over to this country to study, I guess just like me, some 30 years ago. His English was so
poor that whenever he wanted to say something, he had to look it up in his pocket Japanese-English dictionary. One day, he was invited to a party where he was introduced to a beautiful American girl. So he looked up what he wanted to say in his dictionary and told her, "You have a lovely hide." HIDE. The problem was that in Japanese, we have only one or two words that describe the outer covering of anything. But in English, you say human beings - and, strangely enough, pigs - have "skins." Other animals have "hides" on them. Trees have bark, oranges have rinds, bananas have peels, and nuts have shells although I know some "nuts" who have skins on them. So anyway, this Japanese boy's American friend immediately noticed and said, "Hey, young man, in a case like that you should have used the word 'skin,' or 'complexion' would have been even better." So the following Sunday, the Japanese boy goes to the Sunday morning worship service at the local church where the congregation sang, "Hide me, hide me, O my Savior!" He started to sing, "Skin me, skin me, O my Savior!"

As General Johnson said, I grew up in Nagoya, which is the third largest city in Japan. It's primarily an industrial city. It's the home of Mitsubishi Aircraft. It's also near the home of Toyota Motor Company. From my childhood, I have always been interested in cars and airplanes. In fact, my father first had a 1935 Datsun. And in those days, it was my mother who used to drive the car, which was really rare. I also had uncles and other relatives who were aircraft engineers, so I used to make a lot of aircraft models as a child.

After finishing primary school in Nagoya, I was sent by my mother to a special boarding school in Tokyo. The original school was established by the first Japanese women's libber, Mrs. Hani, as a school for girls. The original school buildings were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1921. They are still standing in Tokyo. The school eventually became coed. All the rest of the school buildings were designed by Japanese disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright - father and his son. The school was a Christian school, and the school's motto was "Learning by doing. " It was during my school years there, when some of my classmates and I were sweeping school grounds, that we heard over the radio that Japanese planes had just attacked Pearl Harbor. I was really shocked.
Later, around the beginning of the summer of 1944, all of us students at the school were mobilized for the war effort. We had to work in a nearby Nakajima aircraft engine factory. And, of course, I first saw some of Dolittle's planes that came strafing Tokyo. And then I saw the first wave of B29s in November 1944 drop bombs over this Nakajima aircraft factory. I believe at the time the B29s came during the day, and I saw at least one B29 being shot at and fall to the ground. Since the factory had been bombed, I then decided to go home to Nagoya. That was probably January of 1945.
After I got home, my father said to us that perhaps we should take our household things to our great-grandfather's house northwest of Nagoya. So we asked a farmer to bring his ox-drawn cart to take our things to our great-grandfather's house. After we moved there, a wave of carrier-based fighter planes came strafing the railroad marshaling yard nearby, and I remember standing on the roof of my great-grandfather's house watching. Some of those planes came down so low that I was able to see even the faces of the pilots. I could have waved to them. Those planes really fascinated me.

Then the B29 bombings of Nagoya began-I think there were three bombings during the month of March 1945. At one time, I was still living at my parent's home in Nagoya. A wave of B29s came overhead at night, and some 500-pound general-purpose bombs were dropped and exploded nearby. The bombs really shook us up; they really shook the ground. Then on May 14, 1945, the biggest wave of B29s dropped incendiary bombs on Nagoya. According to Thomas Schoolcraft, flight engineer of the 421st Squadron, there were evidently as many as 524 B29s in the raid, which dropped 2,515 tons of incendiary bombs. The engine noise alone of all those B29s had a devastating psychological effect on us down below. After the all-clear siren had sounded, I hopped onto my bicycle and went to my relatives' homes in Nagoya. They were all safe, but along the way I saw so many charred and burning bodies.

Then finally on May 17, 1945, in the B29 bombing of Nagoya, I lost my parental home. That night I was staying with my mother at my great-grandfather's home, and my father and my younger sister were staying in Nagoya. So again, as soon as the all-clear siren sounded, I hopped on my bike and sped down to Nagoya. I saw that houses just close to ours-rows and rows of them-still stood, intact.
But then I saw that all the homes near the factory south of our house had gone up in flames along with my house.

I first looked for my father and my sister, who both happened to have been in the air raid shelter in the garden, sound asleep, safe. But I still remember standing on the smoldering ruins of my house, awestruck and speechless. I said to myself, "My God, what have we done?" I think those were also the exact words of Robert Lewis, who was the copilot of the Enola Gay, after seeing the mushrooming cloud coming over Hiroshima. I then really felt the inexhaustible strength of the United States, I wondered why we had to fight this doggone losing war against the United States. I said to myself that if only the Japanese war leaders, especially our army leaders, had maintained a dialogue with the U.S. leaders, or if they had had a much better understanding of the United States -especially of the great expanse of the Midwest-the war could have been avoided. Then, of course, on August 6 the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and another one on Nagasaki a few days later. And when I heard the voice of the Emperor for the first time, coming over the radio announcing the war's end, in a way I uttered a sigh of relief. Because, after all, so many lives on both sides had been lost.