Watching on television as the second plane hit the World Trade Center in 2001, Japanese sculptor Masayuki Nagare's thoughts were not with his most famous sculpture, "Cloud Fortress" (1975), which was located at the base of the towers. The then 78-year-old was recalling a time 58 years earlier when, as a pilot with the Imperial Japanese Navy, he too had been trained to dive a plane into U.S. targets.

"I was astonished," he told The Japan Times last week. "The very thing (we had learned) happened in front of my eyes." Sitting up straight on a leather sofa in a visitors room adjoining Ginza's swanky Galerie Nichido — which is staging an exhibition of his recent sculptures — Nagare's voice became grave, momentarily losing its characteristic boisterousness. "I wasn't sad," he says. "I was just thinking that we had entered a terrible age."

Now 84 years old, Nagare has seen enough ages to know a terrible one. During the militaristic 1930s in Japan, he was a rebellious youth making trouble for his well-to-do father. Often playing truant, he preferred learning swordplay and sword-making from a martial-arts expert than going to school. During the war, he piloted a Zero fighter plane — having escaped being made a kamikaze pilot because he got good grades in his exams. (Zero pilots were still taught how to dive planes into enemy ships in case they were winged.)