Terry S

In May 1962, the only Japanese pilot who ever bombed the United States mainland during World War II stepped off a plane in Brookings, Oregon, with a 400-year-old samurai sword hidden inside his suitcase. In September 1942, Imperial Japanese Navy pilot Nobuo Fujita had launched from submarine I-25 in a tiny floatplane and dropped incendiary bombs on the forests outside Brookings. Nobody was hurt, and rain put the small fires out. Twenty years later, the young Americans of the Brookings Jaycees, many of them U.S. combat veterans, invited their former enemy to their town Azalea Festival. Fujita packed his family's 400-year-old katana for a terrifying reason. He silently vowed that if angry Americans pelted him with rotten eggs, he would draw that ancestral blade and commit traditional seppuku right there to apologize with his life. Instead, American World War II veterans stepped forward, looked him in the eye, and shook his hand with warm smiles. Moved to tears by the grace of small-town Americans, Fujita handed over the 400-year-old sword that had guarded his family for sixteen generations as a pledge of eternal peace. When a timber recession hit Brookings in 1985, Fujita paid 15,000 dollars from his own pocket to fly three Brookings high school students to Japan. And when he died at age eighty-five, his daughter buried part of his ashes beneath an Oregon redwood tree. Only a truly great nation can disarm a samurai with an outstretched hand.