I stuffed some emergency medicine in my bag and rode my bike over to the school as fast as I could. The police had been contacted and two policemen were already there. We knew we had to get the unconscious kids back to town and would need all the help we could get. Most of the young men were away at war, though, so we set off with the best we had-myself, the two policemen, an elderly male teacher, the assistant principal and principal, the school janitor. And of course the homeroom teacher who'd been with the kids. We grabbed whatever bicycles we could find, but there weren't enough, so some of us rode two to a bike.

– What time did you arrive at the site?

It was 11:55. I remember since I happened to glance at my watch when we got there. We rode our bicycles to the bottom of the hill, as far as we could go, then climbed the rest of the way on foot.

By the time I arrived several children had partially regained consciousness. Three or four of them, as I recall. But they weren't fully conscious-sort of dizzily on all fours. The rest of the children were still collapsed. After a while some of the others began to come around, their bodies undulating like so many big worms. It was a very strange sight. The children had collapsed in an odd, flat, open space in the woods where it looked like all the trees had been neatly removed, with autumn sunlight shining down brightly. And here you had, in this spot or at the edges of it, sixteen elementary-school kids scattered about prostrate on the ground, some of them starting to move, some of them completely still. The whole thing reminded me of some weird avant-garde play.

For a moment I forgot that I was supposed to treat the kids and just stood there, frozen, staring at the scene. Not just myself-everyone in the rescue group reacted the same, paralyzed for a while by what they saw. This might be a strange way of putting it, perhaps, but it was like some mistake had occurred that allowed us to see a sight people should never see. It was wartime, and I was always mentally prepared, as a physician, to deal with whatever came, in the remote possibility that something awful would occur way out here in the country. Prepared as a citizen of Japan to calmly do my duty if the need arose. But when I saw this scene in the woods I literally froze.