Updates ... Okay...I decided to give you a special and get chapter 9 up sooner for you all. It ties in with chapter 8 to some degree so please enjoy!

PyroDragon2006 ... Talk about timing! I'm writing about it and you're studying it! There are so many angles in which to view an event, it can be most confusing to know which one to look through. I remember when I was studying it, the numbers and the reasons sadly didn't make that much of an impact on me. They were presented so dryly that for some, it lacked any depth or compassionate thought. To read the first hand accounts of survivors of these numerous events is a startling and life considering thing. I hope that this chapter and the previous one have helped in some small way remind everyone that there's always more than two sides.

Snow Weaver ... Yes, unfortunately you'll need a few more tissues. Especially if your imagination is as vivid as Sugoroku's and mine. Don't worry. This is the last of the most terrible stuff. New and better things are just on the horizon!

Scarab Dynasty ... I'm pleased you think chapter 8 is so detailed. I felt like I couldn't detail it enough!

BabyGatomon ... I'm sorry. It was short, but I hope this makes up for it!

Thank you so much everyone for keeping the reviews coming!

Trixie21

Okay, you all know the drill. I have to take up valuable space and time to say that I do not own any part that is the coolness of the Yu-Gi-Oh universe. That honor goes completely to Kazuki Takahashi. Authoress as she bows subserviently before her shrine of great creators... "We're not worthy! We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"

This Old Man: Sugoroku's Story

Part 1: Japan

9. The Quick and the Dead…

The morning after found Sugoroku and his parents huddled under a tree, cold, wet and tired, but alive. They had no food - there had been no time to grab any - and without thinking of what the next few days would bring them, they also had taken no fresh water. In fact, all that they had was what they wore upon their bodies. Compared to many that lay or sit near them, they had much.

Their group, which now consisted of many others that had melded into their original bunch, had managed to stay together and secure a decently sheltered area of wood. With much hugging, closeness and sharing of clothes, the group had only lost but three very old men and one woman who had not been able to recover from their terror and ill health. Many among them were sick with lungs choked with ash, causing at times a lengthy cacophony of raged coughing at regular intervals. But that, or even the wailing of the many women with them, could not stave Sugoroku's weariness from taking over, and in the wee hours of the early morning as the city continued to burn, he fell asleep.

For a full day and night they stayed on the hill, watching the flames die down lower and lower as the smoke thinned out until they could not wait any longer. They had to return. They had found little food in the surrounding area and what there was had been fought over by the people like animals.

Sugoroku and his parents did not abide by this manner of living, if one could call it that, his father had commented, and so they traveled back to the city. As they entered the outer edges, Sugoroku looked about at the homes and streets, all covered by almost half an inch of ash and soot. It reminded him of a late winter snow that had fallen, though unlike anything pristine and white, it had been a dirty gray black snow that at alternating moments felt powdery and gritty. It was a depressing sight.

Fortunately, Osamu found an unoccupied home and with Sugoroku and Sayuri's help, they - somewhat guiltily - took the blankets, several bags of rice, all the food that was still edible, and even a few cooking utensils. Shortly after, a low flying American plane passed over head, encouraging them to return to the hillside where they found that many of their neighbors had either gone or, having had the same idea, entered the city and scavenged for a few meager necessities as well.

Later that night, while sharing the warmth of a small fire with another family, they watched as the Americans crossed over their city repeatedly, viewing the damage and making note of what they had not hit. Osamu made the decision there that they would return to the city only when they absolutely had to scavenge for food and when they were sure that it would finally be safe to be there permanently. Sugoroku asked when they would know that it was okay, but his father had said no more than, "We will know when it happens."

He at least expected something to happen then and was prepared to wait.

Sugoroku was not so patient.

A day later, under the guise of taking a walk to look for food and more firewood, Sugoroku went back to the city to look around and see more. This was Sugoroku's one failing. If it could be called that.

Ever since birth he had been filled with an unnatural curiosity that forever propelled him forward to see, to challenge and know more than his fair share. To sit still with nothing to occupy him rankled at his very nature and no place had ever been more boring than that hillside. It no longer mattered that they practically fought to live. He had to see…to investigate and discover.

What he 'discovered' was the stuff of nightmares.

Within the city he saw devastation on a scale he had not thought possible. Some 300 B-29s, carrying a combined payload of 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs, had reduced 15.8 square miles of the city to ashes. Scorched and baked into an almost flat desert, the heart of the great city of Tokyo still roiled with a heat not normal for even the worst of summer. Everywhere he looked there were jumbled masses of litter from the bricks that had exploded out from their buildings, telegraph poles and trolley cables making for unnerving reminders of where streets had once been. The loss of over 256 thousand buildings alone had been difficult enough, but the loss of life…was far worse.

Throughout the city, littered like so much rice chafe after a harvest, were the bodies of thousands and thousands of people who had not made it and in his active, imaginative mind, Sugoroku saw every moment of death as clearly as if he had been standing right there with them.

Proper air-raid clothing, as recommended by the government to the civilian population, consisted of a heavily padded hood over the head and shoulders that was supposed to chiefly protect people's ears from bomb blasts, since for months, Tokyo had mostly been fire-bombed. Those that had worn the air-raid clothing the night the incendiary bombs dropped, had found the hoods flamed under the rain of sparks; thus people who did not burn from the feet up burned from the head down. Mothers who carried their babies traditional style, strapped to their backs, would discover too late that the padding that enveloped the infant had caught fire. Panicked inner city dwellers, trying to flee with bundles of food or valuables, had crowded into the rare clear spaces - crossroads, gardens and parks - but the bundles caught fire even faster than clothing and the throngs had flamed from the inside. In more than one of these areas could be found huge piles of people; mobs that had not been able to get free of a fire choked road and so had been able to do no more than climb upon the bodies of those who already had fallen, before they themselves succumbed to the heat and pain and fell where they stood, thus adding to the growing piles. Hundreds of people had given up trying to escape and crawled into the holes that served as shelters. Whole families perished in these holes they had dug under their wooden houses because shelter space was scarce in the overpopulated hives of the poor. All too quickly the houses had collapsed and burned on top of them, braising them where they lay.

In every canal, people had hurled themselves into the water. In shallow places, they had waited, half sunk in noxious muck, mouths just above the surface of the water. Hundreds of these had died not of drowning, but of asphyxiation by the burning air and smoke. In still other water ways, the water became so hot that the luckless bathers were simply boiled alive. Some of these canals ran directly into the Sumida river and when the tide rose, people huddling in them did drown. People had crowded onto bridges, but where the spans were made of steel, they gradually heated. Human clusters clinging to the white-hot railings finally let go, falling into the water where they were carried off on the current. Thousands had jammed the parks and gardens that lined both banks of the Sumida, and as panic had brought ever fresh waves of people pressing into the narrow strips of land, those in front were pushed irresistibly toward the river; whole walls of screaming humanity toppling over and disappearing in the deep waters.

In his path he even found strange mounds of ash scattered about that lay stretched and oblong. It was not until a quick wind came and stirred the mounds like sand on a beach - that he shockingly realized what it was he was looking at. They were the completely incinerated shapes of people who had been reduced by the intense heat to nothing more than a silty gray dirt.

So many ways to die… It was almost impossible to think that anyone could have survived at all. But some had. He among them. And now as he walked back to the hill, stepping around rather than over the cadavers, he knew the question was no longer how or even why people had died. It had become 'how would those that still lived - survive?'

Sugoroku's mind was so numbed by what he had seen, he returned to the hill empty handed and under the eyes of his mother and father, he flopped down to lie beside a small cooking fire, his eyes still wide.

His parents did not ask where he had been and why he came back with nothing. There was no need to. Even if they had not known their son as well as they did, his eyes alone were enough to tell all.

Sugoroku did not go back to the city after that except when it became necessary to find more food. When he did, he went only with his parents, his eyes downcast and kept right before his feet. He would not look up or around any more than he had to. It was weeks before he would even leave the hill alone and when the Americans bombed Tokyo twice more, once in April and once more in May, he had no heart to see how the city looked afterward.

He had seen enough the first time.

Chapter Notes...

It almost seems tragic to me that the world should be so familiar with the Atomic bomb drops on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and yet the night of March. 9,1945 slips by without much notice.

Just prior to the Great Tokyo Air Raid, American Bomber Command had ordered a dramatic change in tactics. The bomber runs would be made at night, at low altitude and deliver a mixture of high explosive and incendiary bombs. The objective was to turn the closely-packed, wooden homes and buildings prevalent in the Japanese cities, into raging infernos and ultimately into the most destructive of all weapons - the firestorm.

The Allies had first encountered the phenomenon of the firestorm when the British bombed the German city of Hamburg in August of 1943. The night raid ignited numerous fires that soon united into one uncontrollable mass of flame, so hot it generated its own self-sustaining, gale-force winds and literally sucked the oxygen out of the air, suffocating many of its victims. General Lemay hoped to use this force to level the cities of Japan. Tokyo was the first test.

A successful incendiary raid required ideal weather that included dry air and significant wind. Weather reports predicted these conditions over Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. A force of 334 B-29s was unleashed - each plane stripped of ammunition for its machine guns to allow it to carry more fire-bombs. The lead attackers arrived over the city just after dark and were followed by a procession of death that lasted until dawn. The fires started by the initial raiders could be seen from 150 miles away. The results were devastating: almost 17 square miles of the city were reduced to ashes. Estimates of the number killed immediately range between 100,000 and 200,000, a higher death toll than that produced by the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki six months later. Though to be fair, the death toll in the long run was much higher due to the effects of radiation and thousands of immediately injured people.

These over a hundred thousand people in Tokyo died not in one quick moment, but in long agonized minutes and hours of torture. They were scorched and boiled and baked to death. There was suffocation, drowning, people were crushed to death beneath the fleeing masses and those not killed outright, were left to lay helplessly as they watched death creep closer and closer.

These facts are not in any way factitious. This is what happened. The accounts are numerous.

Where these incidents war crimes? The opinions are mixed and the views varied. I wish it had not happened and would likely say for the death that was caused then 'Yes' to my question. But when one considers that the Japanese home defense plan included that every able conscious person defend their land with belt bombs, pointed sticks and anything else deadly...well... Just imagine how many more millions could have died before it was completely over. The potential for a complete wipe out of the nation was there since their warrior and Samurai ethics dictated 'No surrender at any cost'.

Next Chapter: Changing Lands…

R and R's gratefully appreciated: )