Remember, the dead Talibaners and al Queerdos, will never harm another innocent person again. The know cure for terrorism has been administered to those who assumed winter temp in Afghanistan!
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."
After the despot George read the articles of discontent, he sent Redcoat Marines to erradicate the signers of that historical paper. So historical, those who signed were considered to be the first Warriors of the Revolutionary War.
My ancestor, his wife and 5 daughters fled NY to go western Va. keep from being killed. There were no roads, no Amtrac, no bridges across the many rivers. They fled the redcoat marines like the lucky Chinese did before your gang of killers caught murdered and raped those who didn't flee.
King George would have been a friend/hero of you if he had been Japanese. Heck, he is probably on a shrine with the rest of your Japanese rapist/killer heros of WWII.
Keep posting your inane defenses of the Killer Japanese in WWII. What made you happier, the Rape of Nanking or Pearl Harbor or the Bataan Death March. You probably have wet dreams after you read about those atrocities!
So sit in your Honda and eat your Japanese Rice and dream about the good old days of Japanese Imperialism where your guys ruled the world, until we killed them!
Grampa, I proposed what might have been a more efficient (saving American lives, I kinda' like that) method of stopping the war. Bombing Japan was not without American fatalities.
But if you're happy with ever increasing size of federal government (uniformed or not) fine.
And I'm glad your relatives escaped the horrors of those foreigners attacking and killing citizens on home soil. Both King George and the Japanese military (and you?) were gung-ho on killing.
Meanwhile, my rice in the kitchen comes from socialist California. (oops! Are you in the rice business?)
Tundra and Honda from USA.
And I kinda' enjoyed watching Kwan and Ono skate in the Olympics.....glad we didn't nail their relatives!
Honorable is good but it can be misused to support evil, such as the Prussian officers supporting Hitler's regime.
Did it ever occur to you that just perhaps the idea was to limit TOTAL casualties---both American AND Japanese?? How many MILLIONS would the Japanese militarists have been willing to starve to death in such a blockade before surrendering?? You can bet that the Emperor and the higher-ups would have had their rice bowls filled, no matter what.
How do you feel about the 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11, or do you have some more homelies about hondas?
Are you Harry Browne, by chance?
This guy reminds of Patty Buckwheat or Harry Browne revising WWII history to suit their political agendas!
From the link: "" The aggregate strength of the Homeland armies would...total 2,903,000 men, 292,000 horses, and 27,500 motor vehicles...." Also, I have read printed literature on the matter that put Japan's homeland defense reserve number of fighter planes in the thousands
"Your reference discusses "domestic upheaval" and eroding "morale" in Japan. "
Again, from the link.:
""The fundamental political reality is that it was Japanese, not American, leaders who controlled when and how the Pacific war would end. Those insisting that Japan's surrender could have been procured without recourse to atomic bombs cannot point to any credible supporting evidence from the eight men who effectively controlled Japan's destiny: the six members of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido, and the Emperor. Not only has no relevant document been recovered from the wartime period, but none of them, even as they faced potential death sentences in war-crimes trials, testified that Japan would have surrendered earlier upon an offer of modified terms, coupled to Soviet intervention or some other combination of events, excluding the use of atomic bombs. "
Exiting the war with "honor" was paramount to the Japanese and they were willing to die for that cause alone. Is it better to starve a million people in a blocade over years and years time or kill 100,000 in one blast and force a surrender?
Have you been spanked over this one yet, cause it ain't true....Nanking.
I said that not a single fanatic who was killed ever harmed another innocent after they were killed!
I'm sure that some racist Japanese Murderers and racists escaped final justice and lived.
However, it is a scientific fact that those who were killed, never harmed another innocent person after they were killed. Killing fanatics is the only sure cure to keep fanatics from hurting or killing innocent people.
Remember, the dead Talibaners and al Queerdos, will never harm another innocent person again. The know cure for terrorism has been administered to those who assumed winter temp in Afghanistan!
I threw in my favorite cartoon on this issue and a few comments about the only way to cure terrorism!
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