Posted on 03/14/2002 8:01:56 AM PST by Bubba_Leroy
From the housewives who cart home their groceries by bicycle, to the tiny shops and simple homes, Sumida Ward's irregular grid of narrow, gently bending streets appears at first glance to have gone unchanged for many decades.
But because 57 years ago this week a fleet of American B-29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of napalm-filled bombs on Tokyo, leaving almost nothing standing over 16 square miles, there are few places in Japan where appearances like these could be more deceptive.
In one horrific night, the firebombing of Tokyo — then a city largely of wooden buildings — killed an estimated 100,000 people. In the spring and summer of 1945, similarly devastating raids on over 60 Japanese cities occurred before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to an end.
Despite the huge toll, the firebombing of Tokyo left surprisingly few traces in the popular memory of Japanese, or Americans.
"When I go to speak to schools about what happened, the students just stare at me blankly," said Hiroshi Hoshino, a hale, silver-haired survivor of the destruction who still lives in the Sumida Ward neighborhood where his family lost everything. "Of course, everyone knows about the atomic bombings, but many people are not aware of the napalm attacks at all."
Only recently has Mr. Hoshino, now 71, banded together with other survivors to devote what he says will be the rest of his life to preserving the memory of the people killed in the March 10, 1945, bombings.
Incinerated, trampled and suffocated, people died on the very first day of the incendiary campaign in considerably greater numbers than were killed in Nagasaki. Yet in contrast to the annual memorials to the nuclear victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the anniversary of the Tokyo attack passes almost unnoticed.
This year, $800,000 in private donations enabled the victims to open a small museum last weekend.
There are many reasons why the American firebombing campaign has received so little attention. Japan's cities were incinerated after similar Allied firebombing of German cities, whereas the atomic attacks even now remain unique in history. Moreover, for Japanese, the atomic explosions subtly reinforced feelings of wartime victimhood and righteousness, making the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims important symbols to mourn.
Almost yearly, leading Japanese politicians risk diplomatic incidents with neighboring countries by publicly honoring the country's fallen soldiers.
Yet apart from the atomic bomb victims, almost nothing has been done to honor Japan's civilian dead, partly because this might raise awkward questions about Japanese leaders during the war and partly because of the avid pursuit of friendship with America after 1945.
"Until the San Francisco Treaty in 1952, Japan was under control of the occupation forces, and when they arrived, they applied media restrictions, saying that one should not report things which reflected negatively on the United States," said Shinichi Arai, a historian who has written a comparison of European and Japanese civilian bombing. Later, as the country formed a close alliance with the United States, he said, "we were too busy trying to rebuild our country, and trying to forget the past."
For Japanese leaders, remembering the firebombing victims could mean explaining things like the deliberate placement of war industries in dense residential areas, or the prolongation of the war for many months after its outcome was clear — topics that even now have rarely been discussed here.
For Americans, it would raise questions about the prosecution of the war according to standards that Washington had long denounced as inhuman. "With the firebombings, we crossed the line that we had said was clearly beyond the pale of civilization," said John Dower, a leading American historian of Japan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The American reaction at the time was that they deserved it. There was almost a genocidal attitude on the part of the American military, and it extended to the American public."
Like many other survivors, Mr. Hoshino has little time for historical debate. He focuses on still vivid recollections of his terror at age 14, hearing the shrill air-raid sirens, then, minutes later, seeing a horrible red glow light the sky.
His father was dead and his older brother away at war. Mr. Hoshino tried to lead his mother and sisters to safety, first to a shelter he had dug himself in their yard, and then, as his neighborhood began to go up in flames, through teeming streets.
"My family survived because we ran and ran, until my mother couldn't run anymore," he said. "The place we stopped to rest was an open lot near the river, and somehow the fire never reached us there."
The next day, when his eyes had recovered enough from the heat and smoke to allow him to see, Mr. Hoshino's strongest memory is of the Sumida River thick with bodies.
Ikuyo Misu, 77, a member of Mr. Hoshino's recently founded neighborhood bereavement association, began to cry as she recalled how she had fled the spreading blaze, but was separated from her younger brother, whom she never saw again.
"Ever since then, there have been parts of Tokyo I can't bear to visit," she said. "The next day, the bodies were splayed on the ground everywhere you looked, just like mannequins, but blackened. You couldn't tell male from female."
The Japanese refused to surrender. There was no question that they had lost the war. We firebombed every major Japanese city and still they refused to surrender. It was only after we had dropped our SECOND atomic bomb with the threat of endless more that they finally surrendered.
The Japanese were much like the muslim fanatics that we are at war with today. Now Japan is an ally. There is a lot to be said for bombing a fanatic culture into oblivion.
Also remember that even after Nagasaki it took a tie-breaking vote by Hirohito to surrender. Yeah, there's lots about the war they want to forget.
NaW.
(And I like Japan, Germany and Italy so much better now than when they were totalitarian dictatorships...)
Well, ask a survivor of Bataan or Corregidor about the Japanese.
It was total war. The only thing the Japs understood was force, kinda like Hitler.
US Marines took 12,000 casualties on Iwo Jima, and the US did NOT falter. Why would we deviate from protecting ourselves in this day and age?
The Slimes is a putrid kitty-box liner
It depends on whether you attacked the side which ended up who kicking your a$$.
I'd make a point Nanking or sideing with the Nazi's but I'd rather not have to explain myself.
Because they weren't napalm attacks. Incindiary bombs were used, and napalm is an incindiary device, but it was not used for the massive firebombings that levelled so many cities during the Second World War.
The Japanese were much like the muslim fanatics that we are at war with today. Now Japan is an ally. There is a lot to be said for bombing a fanatic culture into oblivion.
Not a single Japanese fanatic, who was killed on a Japanese ship, sub, plane, on the ground, in a cave, in a tank or in Japan ever hurt another innocent person.
Not a single Japanese Fanatic leader killed during WWII or executed for war crimes ever hurt another innocent person!
This is the only way to handle the current Islamic Fanatics, kill all of them and their financial backers!
Give peace a chance by killing all who would kill us! In spite of what the liberals and the others would try to have us believe, dead terrorists harm no one. If dead terrorists can't harm us, then kill all of those still alive! The formula is simple. It worked in WWII and will work now!
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