September 9th. 78 years ago today, the Japanese began their bombing of the United States mainland.

What? You don't remember that? Nobody in history class told you of the Japanese fire-bombing of the west coast?

Nine months before, on December 7th, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, which brought the US into the war. A few months after that, in April, James Doolittle led a squadron of bombers over Tokyo, just to show the Japanese that they were not immune from attack. It was a complex and mostly suicidal effort, but that's another story.

The Japanese decided that they could respond in kind, and in the early morning hours of September 9th, 1942, a small Japanese attack submarine surfaced a few miles off the coast of Oregon. Strapped to the sub was an airplane.

After they made sure the coast was clear, the crew began assembling the plane. Then Nobuo Fujita, carrying his family's ceremonial sword, got into the plane and was catapulted into the darkness, towards the unsuspecting people of Brookings, Oregon.

Orienting himself with the Cape Bianco lighthouse, he flew inland along the coastal range, dropping two 168-pound incendiary bombs. The Japanese knew that wildfires in the west were no laughing matter. They hoped to continue setting huge fires until the U.S. was forced to bring its Navy back to the coast, leaving the Pacific un-contested.

It didn't work out that way.

The fires that Fujita set were quickly put out. So he came back three weeks later, and bombed the coast again. These fires were also put out quickly.
After each mission, Fujita would fly back out, find his sub, and land. Then they would disassemble the plane and dive deep under the waters, listening to the American depth charge all around them.

While it did not achieve its strategic mission, it did cause quite a bit of panic up and down the coast. People actually saw the Japanese bomber as it flew overhead on its missions, but nobody had much to shoot at it with except for maybe a hunting rifle. The Japanese press had a propaganda coup. One headline said, "Incendiary Bomb Dropped on Oregon State. First Air Raid on Mainland America. Big Shock to Americans."

Later during the war, the Japanese began sending hundreds of little balloons armed with incendiary bombs over to the west coast. By this time the Americans were getting worried. Any information about the damages done was immediately classified. Many fires were set, and a few Americans were lost: one church group on a camping trip and a woman in Montana.

But as we know, the missions were ultimately unsuccessful.

After the war, Fumjita was quite ashamed of his actions. He lost a brother in the war, but the family never spoke of him. In fact, the family had no idea what his job was during the war until one day in 1962 when he announced that he was leaving on a trip to Brookings, Oregon.

The people in Brookings, church groups and other civic organizations, had raised money to buy a ticket for Fujita to come and visit, explain his role in their shared story.

So Fujita packed up, placing his family's sword carefully inside his bags along with his other gear. He was not proud of what he did, but he was prepared to do the honorably thing. If the people of Brookings wanted to humiliate him, throw eggs and call him names, he would allow them. Then he would go back to his room and commit seppuku, or ritual suicide.

But they were not angry. They did not mock or denigrate him. Instead they wanted to hear his version of the story, to show him where the bombs fell, to make a friend out of a former enemy.

He was very moved. He decided to present the town with his family's 400-year-old sword. The town raised over a thousand dollars, buying a huge selection of books about Japan for their small library.

And that's how the Japanese bombing of the west coast of the United States happened.