Tokuro Inokuma, a former Imperial Japanese Army soldier, gained his first taste of the horrors of war in 1945 when he scrambled to gather the scattered limbs of his fellow servicemen, blown apart by a US air raid in Japan.

He was 16.

One of a dwindling number of World War II veterans, Inokuma now finds troubling echoes in Tokyo's policy shift away from the pacifist ideals adhered to after 1945.