Tokyo, which had never been a beautiful city, had now become a dirty city... The capital woke up each morning a little more sordid, as if tainted by the doom-laden night in which it had bathed....The raids had still to begin, and yet, night after night, an obsession gripped the city plunged into darkness by the blackout, an obsession that debilitated and corroded it more than even the appearance overhead of the first enemy squadrons was able to do...Tokyo was a giant village of wooden boards, and it knew it.
Tokyo still continued to go about its business, but in a climate of fear, knowing it was only a question of time before the cataclysm. Fatalism and an inability to grasp the full capacity of US air power resulted in the delay of emergency procedures like evacuation. Nets and webbing were used to camouflage the Diet building, but the majority of structures were exposed. It was a time of inadvisable stalling and strange connections. Government offices were only evacuated after the situation became sufficiently serious for the authorities to have the lions in Ueno Zoo destroyed for fear that they would roam free after the raids. Next to the zoo, the lotus-covered water at Shinobazu Pond was drained and turned into a vegetable patch.
“If the flavour of the city must go,” a 1944 entry in Kafu’s diary reads, “I would like to go with it.” His wish almost came true when his house burned down in the air raids a year later. Kafu, who was more attached to ideas and the past than to people or even property, never really minded the excuse to change address, and the burning of this particular house seems to have been less important to him than the loss during the air raid of his library of 10,000 books.
In all, Tokyo suffered 102 raids, the most intense between 1944 to March 1945. The most devastating raid, on the night of 9-10 March, began around 10.30 p.m., with hundreds of B-29 Super Fortress bombers offloading thousands of tons of incendiary and fragmentation bombs onto the most densely populated working-class districts east of the river. Three hundred and thirty-four B-29s, each loaded with up to six tons of oil, napalm, jellied gasoline and phosphorous, swooped over Asakusa. Some 2,000 tons of incendiaries were dropped on the quarter, a twelve square-mile area where the population density was 103,000 per square mile. Residents recall that the gasoline-filled bombs were dropped concentrically, to make sure there were no avenues of escape. The planes then turned to target the wards east of the Sumida. Napalm, a substance that would be used extensively in a much later Asian war, needed to be tested, and Tokyo provided the perfect killing laboratory. According to eyewitness accounts by pilots and journalists travelling in the B29s, the fires could be seen from 150 miles out in the Pacific. The fuselages of the planes that returned to their base in the Mariana Islands were covered in soot from the inferno.
From a military perspective the operation was an overriding success. Le May was to record in his memoir that 80-100,000 people were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” The general elaborated on his position when he stated that, “There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders.” For good measure, an extra four thousand tons of flammables were dropped on residential areas of north-western Tokyo on 26 May.
The extreme nature of the bombing, though generally supported by US planners, did have a small number of detractors. Brigadier Bonner Fellers, MacArthur’s military secretary, a well-read Japan scholar, condemned the bombings as “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.” An estimated two-fifths of the city was burnt down in the horrors of that spring. Aerial photos of the devastation reveal most of the bridges across the Sumida intact. Perhaps because of their future usefulness for the occupiers, they were spared. Mirroring Tokyo’s obliteration were large incinerated tracts of neighbouring Kawasaki, an industrial area, and the port city of Yokohama.
The sense of helplessness, breeding inertia and fatalism, is captured in Sumida River, a fictional account of those days by Shimamura Toshimasa:
Already, crimson flames were rising in the sky to the east of Tokyo. It was obvious that the B29s were bent on attacking Tokyo east of the Sumida River. The dark forms of the planes caught in the searchlights were heading, one after another, straight into the conflagration, scorching the night sky... Against the backdrop of the crimson sky the gigantic silver bodies of the B29s shone eerily as if bathed in blood. Some flew surprisingly low as they crawled through the sky. I watched feeling utterly powerless to do anything.
Some Tokyo residents, naming the incendiary cylinders that were dropped to mark the target spots “Molotov flower baskets”, claimed to find a terrifying beauty in the resulting fires and in the blue sprays of spark that fell from bombs that accidentally exploded in mid-air. This was doubtless part of the mood of collective derangement, the scrambling of the senses, the descent into hallucination springing from a combination of trauma and malnutrition.
The main character of Sakaguchi Ango’s 1946 story One Woman and the War is heard to claim:
war really was beautiful. It was a beauty you could not anticipate; you could only glimpse it in the midst of your terror. As soon as you were aware of it, it was gone. War was without fakery, without regrets, and it was extravagant. I didn’t begrudge losing my house, my neighbourhood, my life to it. Because there was nothing that I was sufficiently attached to that I would begrudge losing.
And then, on the air raids:
If I were asked what about the night bombings was the most magnificent, truth to tell, my real feeling, more than anything else, was one of pleasure at the vastness of the destruction. The dull silver B-29s too, as they suddenly hove into view amid the arrows of the searchlights, were beautiful. And the antiaircraft guns spitting fire, the droning B-29s that swam through the noise of the guns, and the incendiary bombs that burst in the sky like fireworks. But only the vast, world-destroying conflagration on the ground gave me complete satisfaction.
Literary critic and essayist Takeyama Michio, was also mesmerized by the poetics of death, describing one air raid in unabashedly lyrical terms:
It was the third or fourth time that B-29s had appeared in the skies over Tokyo. In the clear early winter air, they floated calmly, violet and sparkling. Shining like a firework, a Japanese plane approached like a shooting star and rammed a B-29. Then, spinning and giving off black smoke, it fell to earth. Drawing long white frosty lines, the B-29s faded slowly into the crystalline distance.
Describing the March 1945 bombings of Tokyo that resulted in the extermination of tens of thousands of civilians in a single night, Mishima Yukio told a later audience: “it was the most beautiful fireworks display I have ever seen.” Two months after those raids, Mishima witnessed another air strike from a shelter on the outskirts of the city, where a group of men were watching from inside a warren of caves: “The workmen were particularly vociferous. The sound of hand-clapping and cheering rang out from the mouths of the scattered tunnels as though in a theatre... It seemed to make no essential difference whether the falling plane was ours or the enemy’s.”
Mishima, who could always identify a redeeming aesthetic even in the midst of ruin, expressed his personal feelings when he wrote of the incident and others like it: “The air raids on the distant metropolis, which I watched from the shelter at the arsenal, were beautiful. The flames seemed to hue to all the colours in the rainbow: it was like watching the light of a distant bonfire at a great banquet of extravagant death and destruction.”
The young Mishima managed to publish his first book of short stories in October 1944, in “a modest attempt to preserve the literary tradition of the empire.” This was no mean feat as Tokyo began to burn, and paper supplies with it. In the months after the spring attacks more than three million people left the city. Many felt consternation when the annual May sumo tournament was moved to an outdoor setting and reduced to a week after two of its highest ranking wrestlers, Matsuragata and Toyoshima, were killed in the raids and the main arena partially damaged. The same month, a large section of the Imperial Palace was destroyed. The structu
re, dating from 1884, had been built of the very best cypress wood. The bombs devastated the main building, its copper roofs collapsing on exquisitely painted screens, ceilings and chandeliers imported from Europe. The same night the Meiji shrine was obliterated.
The disillusionment of ordinary people with a holy war gone horribly wrong grew during these months. By the summer of 1945 anonymous letters calling for the end of the war were being received by newspapers, though none were printed. Contempt for those in charge manifested itself in graffiti scrawled over walls and lampposts, reading “Overthrow the Government,” “End the War,” and “Kill the Emperor.” It was time for the government to confront the truth, to rouse itself from its martial dreams and imperial myths. All but the leaders of the army were now reconciled to the inevitability of defeat.
Discontent with the direction of the war was exacerbated by severe food shortages. Most families had long been reduced to a daily diet of barley and potatoes, but now even that was in short supply. People were encouraged to supplement mineral deficiency with rose petals, re-used tea leaves and seeds, their lack of starch with peanut shells, acorns and sawdust. A shortage of protein could be made up by consuming grasshoppers, snakes, worms and moles. Properly cleaned and prepared, the authorities ventured to suggest, there was little difference in taste between rats and small birds.
Families who possessed heirlooms of any value walked or clambered into congested trains that took them into the countryside, where their precious lacquer ware, pottery, gold, and cherished silk kimonos, objects that might have been in the family for generations, were traded for a meagre sack or two of rice or sweet potatoes. Reduced to virtual refugee status, many people found themselves with, quite literally, only the clothes they stood in. Memories are fading, but elderly Japanese who remember those times still bear simmering grudges against the farmers of prefectures surrounding Tokyo, like Chiba and Saitama, who gained so much in those trade offs.
After these excursions into the farms on the periphery of the city, many would return to Tokyo only to find that their homes had vanished. Survivors tell of a city scattered with “green stones”, an allusion to the glass lumps formed after bottles had melted in the fierce heat from the incendiary bombs. A neighbour of mine, who fled her home in the district of Honjo, recalled the difficulty she and her family experienced in locating the charred outline of their former residence. The molten remains of an iron teapot set, a gift from relatives living in one of the northern prefectures, were the only means of identifying their plot.
Voice of the Crane
At 10.30 a.m. on 14 August, the emperor took the unprecedented step of addressing the nation on the radio. The broadcast was made in what was termed the Voice of the Crane, meaning an imperial command whose resonance, like that of the bird, could still be heard in the sky after the crane’s passing. Fosco Maraini, an Italian held in custody along with fellow countrymen suspected of anti-fascism, recalled the summons to listen to the broadcast: “The Emperor made his speech (in which he actually did announce the surrender), but none of the Japanese around us could understand him. The text was, in fact, in a language that was only known in court - it was so different from everyday speech that you had to be a philologist to make sense of it.”
Once understood, the message in which the emperor exhorted his people to “endure the unendurable,” was meekly accepted. A number of the more fanatical army officers, unable to bear the thought of defeat, marched to the parade grounds in front of the palace and disembowelled themselves with their swords. For those like Mishima, who worshipped the more muscular gods of death, this was an incomparably beautiful act, the ultimate sacrifice to a shattered idol; for the majority of Japanese, this act of atonement for the loss of the country’s military honour symbolized the misguided values that had led to calamity in the first place.
In February 1944 the population of the capital had stood at 7.3 million. By November 1945 death and evacuation had reduced the city to 3.5 million inhabitants, the majority weak from hunger. A quarter of a million residents had died. Three-quarters of a million houses had been razed, three million people made homeless. The normally indigent, the day labourers and rag pickers, people who had always been there, now seemed more visible.
The physical damage was astounding. Half the city’s houses had vanished, along with the great Senso-ji temple and Meiji shrine. The five miles of downtown Tokyo that stretched from Hibiya to Shibuya was little more than a charred plain. People called cities like Tokyo yaki-nohara (“scorched fields”). The once glittering district of Ginza was now a wasteland of rubble and twisted metal. Tramcar tracks had sprung from their casings and melted. The “city of civilization” was a ruin. No longer obscured by buildings, the majestic cone of Mount Fuji could once again be seen on the horizon above the ash-covered landscape as it had in the woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai.
Five out of seven million Tokyo residents had left the city by the war’s end. They now began to drift back. With 65 per cent of all homes destroyed, the spectre of massive homelessness loomed. Shantytowns sprang up overnight, makeshift hovels constructed of foraged wood, chicken wire, tarpaper and debris. War widows and orphans resorted to finding shelter in burnt-out buses, tram cars, underground subway tunnels of large stations like Ueno, bomb craters and caves dug out of rubble. Where enough hovels were huddled together to form something resembling a community, occupants took turns in bathing in oil drums.
The English poet Edmund Blunden, who came to Tokyo shortly after the war to teach, was less shocked perhaps than many of the young American soldiers who drove for the first time into the scorched city, observing that “It has been the fate of my generation to become habituated to the ruining of cities.” The writer’s comparative perspective came from the fact that he had been here before: “The Tokyo which I formerly knew was ruins, after the earthquake and the fire, though some districts had been spared; and now I was coming again to a desolated and incinerated city.”
Tokyo Redux
1945-1970s
On 15 August 1945 the filmmaker Kurosawa Akira was summoned to his studio in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward to listen to the emperor’s radio announcement. In his book Something Like an Autobiography, he recalled the day:
I will never forget the scenes I saw as I walked the streets that day. On the way from Soshigaya to the studios in Kinuta the shopping street looked fully prepared for the Honourable Death of the Hundred Million. The atmosphere was tense, panicked. There were even shop owners who had taken their Japanese swords from their sheaths and sat staring at the bare blades.
However, when I walked the same route back to my home after listening to the imperial proclamation, the scene was entirely different. The people on the shopping street were bustling about with cheerful faces as if preparing for a festival the next day. I don’t know if this represents Japanese adaptability or Japanese imbecility.
The “Honourable Death of the Hundred Million” was a reference to General Tojo Hideki’s February 1944 “emergency declaration” in which, as prime minister and head of the military cabinet, he had called for ichioku gyokusai, “one hundred million shattering like a jewel.” Japan’s population at the time was seventy million, Koreans and Taiwanese would also have been included in the order for mass suicide in the event of defeat. Whether the “hundred million hearts beating as one”, as the propaganda of the day put it, would actually have gone through with a mass suicide is questionable, but the Japanese, prepared for the worst, had, to quote scholar Tsurumi Kazuko’s chilling term, been effectively conditioned in a collective “socialization for death”.
Many people have commented on the alacrity with which the Japanese are capable of certain kinds of change. Even so, the extraordinary turnaround in sentiment was baffling, even for the Americans. John Dower, in Embracing Defeat, his matchless history of the occupation, explains:
The Americans arrived anticipating, many of them, traumatic confrontation with fanatical emperor worshippers. They were acco
sted instead by women who called “yoo hoo” to the first troops landing on the beaches in full battle gear, and men who bowed and asked what it was the conquerors wished.
After all the horrors they had experienced, the Japanese wished for nothing more than to re-emerge reborn from the flames, purged of the past. The Americans, it turned out, were just the right people to help them achieve their purpose. And there were a few things that the occupiers, from the savagery of their own campaign in the Pacific war zone to the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were disposed to forgetting themselves.
General Douglas MacArthur’s aircraft touched down at Atsugi naval aerodrome on 30 August 1945. It was a carefully rehearsed performance. The general was a seasoned public relations figure, a ham actor perhaps, but one who understood that the times required drama and presence, not subtlety or finesse. Known in his earlier chief of staff days for flaunting military conventions by wearing a Japanese kimono at his desk when the whim took him, MacArthur brought all his tried and tested acting props along with him to Japan that day. Emerging at the top of the steps, the commander thrust his corncob pipe between his teeth, surveyed the conquered land before him through military issue dark glasses. It was a well practised pose that had already become his trademark, but one that was calculated to impress the uninitiated Japanese. The general held the pose just long enough for the press photographers to get some good shots.
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 24