Photo/Illutration Kazusada Sumiyama spent about 10 years translating the report by the 9/11 Commission. (Kotaro Ebara)

Twenty-four Japanese nationals were among the close to 3,000 victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States 20 years ago.

The father of one of those victims has now published a Japanese translation of the U.S. bipartisan panel report about the attacks in an attempt to find answers to the carnage that claimed his son's life.

At his home in Tokyo’s Meguro Ward, Kazusada Sumiyama, 84, has compiled a considerable library of works related to the 9/11 attacks.

“Now, I don’t know how many I have acquired,” he said.

Watching the news on Sept. 11, 2001, Sumiyama saw smoke rising from a building in New York with which he was familiar.

He had visited the World Trade Center about two months earlier as his son, Yoichi, 34, worked at the New York branch of Fuji Bank, which has since been amalgamated into Mizuho Bank.

But Sumiyama realized that the tower on fire and billowing smoke was not the one where his son worked, so he felt no immediate cause for alarm. Then a second passenger plane slammed into the other tower.

In April 2002, a portion of Yoichi’s finger was found in the debris of the collapsed tower. A forensic scientist told Sumiyama that the rest of his son had been simply obliterated.

Wanting to feel closer to his son, Sumiyama and his wife, Mari, 81, have paid visits to New York each September to observe the anniversary.

In 2004, as they were preparing to return to Japan, Sumiyama browsed at an airport shop and came across the report published by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The report by what more commonly is known as the 9/11 Commission ran to more than 500 pages.

Wanting to learn who the terrorists were and what kind of society created such individuals, Sumiyama began work on translating the document about 10 years ago.

Every morning, he opened the report, sat in front of his computer and turned the pages of a dictionary as he worked on his translation. He completed about three pages a day. To help him out, Sumiyama took classes in English composition and undertook studies of the Koran.

What he vaguely came to understand was how many young disaffected Muslims turned to terrorism after becoming deeply involved in Muslim fundamentalism.

Sumiyama also noticed similarities with the Aum Shinrikyo cult that carried out sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that left 13 people dead and thousands sickened. Many of the Aum members who carried out the attacks were graduates of elite Japanese universities.

Sumiyama raised money through crowdfunding to publish his translation through Korocolor Publishers. The book went on sale from Sept. 11.

As Sumiyama was writing the postscript on Aug. 15, he heard over the news that the Taliban had seized control of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

“I thought my son and the other victims had been sacrificed in order to help build Afghanistan as a nation,” Sumiyama said. “I just cannot accept that the situation has returned to what it was before.”

Sumiyama plans to publish another book before the end of the year that will analyze the events of 9/11 from a Japanese perspective with the hope that young Japanese will read it to learn about the attacks.

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