Free One Man's Justice by Akira Yoshimura

from the heart of the blaze. His face felt as if it was on fire, and billows of smoke stung his eyes.
    The city contained no military installations or munitions factories, so the purpose of the fire raid could only have been to kill and maim civilians and reduce their dwellings to ashes. The thought flashed through his mind that the scene he was witnessing had been repeated time and again in other cities and towns all over Japan, with innumerable non-combatants sent to their deaths.
    The strength of interceptor fighter units in Kyushu had been dramatically reduced by US bombing attacks on air force facilities in the area, and that night, too, there were no reports of Superfortresses being shot down by fighters, so the anti-aircraft batteries had more or less been left to defend the island’s skies themselves.
    Takuya blinked in pain as he gazed into the sea of flames.
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    Dawn came, and reports flooded into the tactical operations centre, outlining the damage in Fukuoka city. The fires had been extinguished by around 6 a.m., but apart from the Tenjin-machi and Hakozaki-machi areas, the entire city centre had been burnt to the ground, with an estimated ten thousand dwellings destroyed in the fires. Early accounts suggested that the death toll would be extremely high.
    Subsequent reports described citizens who had fled during the night returning that morning to survey the smouldering embers of what had been their homes. Later several dozen people had gathered around the front gate of the headquarters complex, clamouring for the execution of the captive airmen. There were said to be a large number of women among the crowd, and some of them had been weeping as they screamed for the crewmen to be killed. No doubt they were infuriated at the thought that the Americans were still alive, safe from the blaze thanks to the fire-fighting efforts of the garrison. While the prisoners might have been afraid of being burnt alive, they also might have felt some kind of satisfaction in knowing that it was their compatriots who were raining death and destruction on the city below.
    Takuya had little difficulty understanding the thinking of the people who had gathered in front of the main gate. The prisoners not only had burnt to death thousands of defenceless old men, women and children, but were now being kept alive with a steady supply of food that the average person in the street could only dream about. Surely there was no reason to let them live any longer.
    â€˜What the hell are they up to at headquarters? They should execute them as soon as possible,’ muttered Takuya to himself.
    Medical Officer Haruki’s name was on the list of dead. In conjunction with his work as deputy head doctor at the military hospital adjacent to the headquarters building, he had been given the honorary rank of lieutenant, and he was attending a doctors’ meeting when the air raid started the previous evening. Evidently he had been unable to make it to safety when their building caught fire. The casualty reports also listed the names of several non-commissioned officers and numerous enlisted men and civilian employees working at headquarters. Word also came in of family members of headquarters staff killed in the firestorms that had ravaged the city’s residential areas.
    Takuya could hear all this news being reported as he worked at his tasks as anti-aircraft intelligence officer. A deterioration in the weather meant that raids were unlikely from Saipan-based aircraft, but all the same, as the possibility of more short-range attacks by bombers flying up the line of the Nansei Islands from bases in Okinawa could not be ruled out, Takuya paid particular attention to reports coming in from the southern Kyushu region.
    He had just finished eating a late lunch of sorghum with barley rice and a piece of salted salmon when a staff officer from headquarters briskly entered his room, stepped up to Takuya’s desk and announced in an