The couple started a nursery to support local mothers in 1965, and a kindergarten four years later.

Mr. Harada visited Pearl Harbor in 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the airstrike. It was not until then, he said, that he learned that the raid had been a sneak attack and that Japan had at that point not formally declared war on the United States.

He said it was only after the Persian Gulf war that year, when the United States forced Iraqi troops to withdraw from Kuwait, that he could bring himself to speak publicly about his own wartime experience. He said he was appalled that Japanese teenagers were describing the conflict in the Mideast as if it were a video game.

“Until I die, I will tell about what I saw,” Mr. Harada said. “Never forgetting is the best way to protect our children and our children’s children from the horrors of war.”

He was born in Asajawa, an alpine village in Nagano Prefecture, on Aug. 11, 1916. In 1937, he graduated first in his flight school class.

Mr. Harada was among more than 300 pilots whom the Japanese cited as World War II aces, an honorific usually reserved for those who have downed five or more enemy aircraft.

He described himself in the Times interview as “the last Zero fighter,” or at least the last remaining pilot who had flown the agile Mitsubishi fighter plane early in the war. (The name Zero was derived from the last digit of the year on which the fighter entered naval service: 2600 on the Imperial calendar, 1940 on the Gregorian calendar.)