The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  A distant radio militantly delivers the Japanese news of the day and a few MPs, still in pairs, roam the recently empty streets. A single woman, modest in bright red, knees together, maybe a geisha going home, hurries. Greer Garson luxuriates, her paper face half in the morning sun, and a man dressed like Charlie Chaplin, a placard on his shoulders, begins his daily advertising.

  In the alleys, the empty pedicabs are lined up, and around the early alley fires the all-night drivers yawn and warm their hands while early farmers lead their laden horses into the city. An empty Occupation bus, with “Dallas” stenciled on both sides, makes its customary stops—the PX, the Commissary, the Motor Pool—but no riders are in it. Occupation women with khaki skirts, out early, try unsuccessfully to hail a passing U.S. 8th Army jeep.

  The rising sun is now caught by the blank windows of the taller buildings and casts reflections—the silver flash of spectacles, a passing gold tooth, the dead white of a mouth-mask. The food shops open and the spicy bitterness of pickled radish mingles with the sweet stench of fish, mingles with the scents of the passing nightsoil carrier, his oxen and his cart.

  The rolled metal shutters of the smaller shops are still locked but before the open entrances of larger buildings MPs stand and wait, their white-gloved hands behind their backs, their white helmets above their white faces. They stand in front of most of the Occupation buildings—the gray Dai Ichi Building, the square Meiji Building, the pale Taisho Building, the squat Yusen. To the south rises the box-like Radio Tokyo and, in all directions, the billets of the Occupation itself, the American flag floating above them.

  The clouds drift out to sea and the city lies under the winter sun. The pedicab drivers go home, and the wives serve the morning soup. The sun and smoke rise into the air and the radios shout into the sky, while the streetcars rattle and the auto horns honk, and the fishing boats cry, and the railroads fill up the city.

  The account of the destruction of Tokyo that follows is taken from interviews and then given to one of the characters in Richie’s novel Where Are the Victors?

  Tokyo/Shinjuku, Winter, 1947. eighth army signal corps

  He remembered the day. It was in a cool, sunny, unseasonably windy March [1945]. The children who had them still wore their furs. His two sisters, dressed alike in little fur hoods with cats’ heads embroidered on them, were sent off to school, and his father went to work next door at his lumberyard.

  It was the third day of a leave from the Army. He had a new lieutenant’s uniform. His mother wanted him to stay near home and call on the neighbors. He wanted to walk around the city and show off his new uniform.

  Their home was in Fukagawa, which was like no place else in Tokyo. The carpenters pulled their saws, and the logs floated in the canals. The factories blew smoke to the sky, and the dye from the chemical plants made the canals green as leaves. The Chinese ran restaurants and even the poor Koreans happily opened oysters all day long.

  Some of Tokyo had already been bombed, but those few districts were far away, and the people in the rest of the city were not afraid. The radio said that the Americans dropped bombs indiscriminately and that there was no need to fear a mass attack as the radar would detect the intruders and give ample time for escape.

  Just a year before Fukagawa had been bombed, but the damage had been slight. The bombs fell mostly into the countryside and people decided that the Americans were not very skilled in this important matter of bomb dropping. Fukagawa, in the suburbs, seemed as safe as Shinbashi, in the center.

  [That evening] he heard the watchman at eleven when the call of the watch was interrupted by the air-raid sirens. Earlier in the afternoon, while at the movies, he had heard an alert, but the all clear had sounded immediately after.

  Now he walked swiftly through Shinbashi Station and ran through the standing passengers, past the halted trains, to the top level of the station. He didn’t really expect to see anything. He only wanted to be soldierly.

  He arrived just in time to see the sudden flare of massed incendiary bombs. It was Fukagawa. The planes were apparently traveling at great speed. It was impossible to say how many there were but it seemed hundreds.

  A great ring of fire was spreading. The planes were so low he couldn’t see them and could tell where they had been only by the fires that sprang behind them. There was an enormous explosion, like August rockets on the Sumida River, and a great ball of fire fell back on the district. A chemical plant had been hit. Seconds later he felt the warm burst of air from the blast, miles away.

  Later he heard that the planes had come in so low that they escaped the radar. The antiaircraft could do nothing against planes that near and that swift. The stiff March wind spread the flames and he later remembered thinking of the canals that cut through the section, and thought that people would at least find safety in the water. There would be water enough for everyone.

  He didn’t remember how long he stood on the top platform of Shinbashi Station and watched the destruction of Fukagawa, Honjo, Asakusa, Ueno. But he remembered wondering why they were so selective—why not the Ginza, why not Shinbashi, why not he himself? He later remembered walking up the deserted streets past the closed motion picture house where he had been that afternoon. It was near dawn when he reached the bridge across the Sumida, the last pink of the fires replaced by the first pink of dawn.

  There he saw those coming from Fukagawa. Most had been burned. They carried scorched bedding on their backs, or trundled bicycles with possessions strapped to them. They walked slowly and did not look at him as they passed. He wondered where they were all going and stopped an old man who told him that everything had been burned, and that everyone had been killed.

  He walked across the bridge and finally reached Fukagawa. He could not believe what he saw. There was nothing. Nothing but black and smoking ruins as far as he could see. He had never known that so much could be destroyed in one night.

  On the street he found a bicycle that belonged to no one and on it he started toward his home. But nothing looked the same. There were no streets any more. In cleared places were piles of burned bodies, as though a family had huddled beneath a roof that had now vanished. They seemed very small and looked like charcoal.

  He peddled slowly along what had been a street. Long lines of quiet, burned people, all looking the same, came toward him. He didn’t know where to turn north to go to his father’s lumberyard. Nothing was familiar. He leaned his bicycle against a smoking factory wall and looked toward where his home should have been but wasn’t. The lines of the burned moved slowly by, and suddenly he began to cry.

  After he had cried he looked at the people again and saw his younger brother coming toward him. They stood, looking at each other, amazed that such a thing could happen. His brother had spent the night at school because he had had to finish a war work project of some kind, and he had not heard about the raid until he woke up. Now he too had just arrived and didn’t know where their home was either. So in the growing light they began walking.

  Troops had been brought in and were clearing the streets, or where they supposed streets had been. They shifted the bodies with large hooks and loaded them, one after the other, onto trucks. Often the burned flesh pulled apart, making the work more difficult.

  [The brothers] walked on, past mothers holding burned babies to their breasts, past little children, boys and girls, all dead, crouched together as though for warmth. Once they passed an air-raid shelter and looked in. It was full of bodies, many of them still smoldering.

  The next bridge was destroyed, so they decided to separate. His brother would go north and he south. It was the first time they had used these terms with each other. Usually they spoke of up by the elementary school or down by the chemical plant. His brother started crying and walked away, rubbing his eyes. They were to meet at their uncle’s house in Shinagawa.

  He walked south to the factory sections. The chemical works had exploded and what little remained was too hot to get near. Some of the wa
lls were standing, burned a bright green from the dye, the color of leaves. In a locomotive yard the engines were smoking, as though ready for a journey, the cars jammed together as in a railway accident.

  There were some in the ruins still alive, burned or wounded. Those who couldn’t walk were patiently waiting for help by the side of the tracks. There was no sound but the moaning of an old woman. It sounded like a lullaby.

  He saw only two ambulances. They were full of wounded, lying there as though dead. Farther on, prisoners of war were clearing the smoking ruins. They wore red uniforms and carried blankets to remove the dead.

  Eventually he recognized the Susaki district. Yesterday it had been a pleasure center, with sidewalk stalls, music, women peeping from behind latticework screens. Now there was nothing. The houses, like all the decorations, had been made only of wood and paper and had burned almost at once. Now no one moved. He turned back.

  The small bridges across the canals had been burned. He had to stay on the large island connected to Nihonbashi by the bridge across the Sumida. He looked across the canals and saw people still alive on the little, smoking islands. They shouted and waved, but there was nothing he could do, so he went on. Some were swimming across to the large island. They had to push aside others who floated there, face down.

  In a burned primary school he saw the bodies of children who had run there, to their teachers, for protection. Later he learned that there were two thousand dead children in that school alone. They lay face down on the scorched concrete floor, as though asleep. The kimono of some still smoked. The teachers to whom they had fled lay among them.

  It was past noon when, suddenly very tired, he walked back across the bridge to Nihonbashi where he took a trolley to Shinagawa. It stopped continually. It was filled with wounded. Others, less wounded, hung from the roof and the sides. He could have arrived sooner by walking.

  At his uncle’s house he found his brother and, surprisingly, his uncle. The latter’s arm was badly burned. He had come home that afternoon, walking the entire distance. He told them about their family. They had been sitting at the table, his sister and himself. The younger girls had already gone to bed and his brother-in-law was at Susaki.

  The first planes bombed around Fukagawa, and then closed the circle, making it smaller and smaller. It was hard to escape because it happened so fast. Almost instantly there was fire on all sides.

  By the time the air-raid sirens had begun they heard the explosions, and flames were leaping up in the distance. The planes wheeled over them and the circle of fire was much nearer. They got the girls up, but by the time they were dressed the fire was only a block away. They tried to escape from the lumberyard but the little bridge that led to the Tokyo road was burning. So they climbed into the canal in back of the house.

  Bombs were constantly dropping and finally one of them hit the neighborhood. The heat was terrible. Even the logs in the canal began to smoke. They watched the fire spread, in just a few seconds, to the storehouses and across the entire island. His mother and sisters held onto a log and began to cry.

  Their uncle found a pan and dipped water over their heads and shoulders. The little fur hoods with cats embroidered on them helped protect the children for a while, but when the fur began smoking, he tore off the hoods and poured water directly on their hair. The half of the log above water cracked in the heat but he kept on pouring.

  There he had remained until early morning. Around one, the fire burning around them just as fiercely as before, he became very tired. He tried to get a better grip on the log but found his arm so burned that it stuck to the wood. He was not able both to hold up his sister and nieces and at the same time continue to pour water on them.

  They were very quiet and, he was sure, unconscious. His arm was so tired that he too must have lost consciousness. The pain of his arm’s slipping across the burning log woke him. The mother and two little girls were gone.

  The next day he and his brother went again to Fukagawa. It was now filled with rescue workers. They found their canal and where their home had been. Everything was gone. Only the ground remained. They identified the house from its foundation stones. Near where the house had been they were removing bodies. He tried to find some of the neighbors but couldn’t—everyone there was a stranger. No one knew where his father’s workers were either. They had lived above the warehouse where the finished lumber had been stored.

  Later he learned that thirty thousand people had been killed that night. Some said it was the unseasonable wind that had done the most damage. It spread the fire and heat. The explosions caused more wind until, about one in the morning, it blew through the flames at a mile a minute.

  It was almost a week before the Emperor inspected the ruins. By this time the bodies had all been removed. Already the streets were being mapped and bright wooden bridges connected the islands. People said that the Army had delayed the Emperor’s arrival. They didn’t want him to see how terrible the fire had been. If he had, he would have stopped the war at once. But now, with a new week’s fighting begun, he could do nothing about it. It was the fault of the Army.

  For the rest of the summer his brother lived with his uncle and he himself was sent to Tachikawa Air Base. Then it was August and the war was over. When he saw Fukagawa again people were living there once more. The main business was still lumber. Before the fire there had been over two thousand lumber dealers, but now there were only a little over a hundred. There were no chemical plants but the dye works had opened and the canals were green again. The Chinese restaurants were thriving as usual and even small Korean centers had sprung up. But now their old occupation—opening oysters—had been taken over the Japanese. It was about the only way to make a living in Fukagawa.

  *

  From the window of my billet, Kyobashi looks like Hiroshima—the same holes where whole buildings once were, the same odd empty spaces in what once was solid street. Further off there are more buildings standing, though separately, revealing that there was once something between.

  At the Ginza crossing there are quite a few buildings standing. The Mitsu­koshi Department Store, gutted, hit by a firebomb, even the window frames twisted by the heat. Across the street is the white stone Hattori Building, its clock tower with its cornices and pediments much as it had been.

  There is not much else left: the ruins of the burned-out Kabuki-za, the round, red, drum-like Nichigeki, undamaged. At Yurakucho, on the edge of the Ginza, are a few office buildings and the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater, now renamed the Ernie Pyle.

  Otherwise, block after block of rubble, stretching to the horizon. Wooden buildings do not survive firestorms. Those that stand were made of stone or brick. Yet, already, among these ruins there is the yellow sheen of new wood. People are returning to the city.

  *

  I have some photos taken last year in the subway corridors of Ueno Station. There, sitting or lying on straw mats or the bare concrete, are some of the thousands of the hungry homeless. Men, women, a few children,

  In one photo, they are being inspected by two bespectacled policemen wearing mouth masks. Many of the people are dirty, and all wear remnants of what they had owned during the war: cracked shoes, torn blouses, battered hats, buttonless shirts. But no one looks sad.

  Tokyo/Ginza, Winter, 1947. eighth army signal corps

  Everyone is smiling—everyone except the policemen, and maybe they are as well beneath their masks. Smiling for the camera, making a good impression, best foot forward. Even in the depths of national poverty everyone remembers this.

  Up above, on the plaza, around the statue of Saigo Takamori, there are many more, sitting on benches and embankments—all of them waiting. Waiting, it seemed, for this too to pass so that they can get on with their lives.

  Many have been and gone. The pedestal of Saigo’s statue is plastered with handwritten notices; I had someone look at the photo and read them to me. “Watanabe Nori­ko—Your Mother Waits Here Every Day from One to Five; Grandmothe
r Kumagai—Shiro and Tetsu­ko Have Gone to Uncle Sato’s in Ao­mori—Please Come; Suzuki Tetsuro—Your Father Is Sitting on the Staircase to the Left—If You See This Please Come.”

  The snows and rains have washed the older notices away and new ones are put up. They are like the votive messages left at shrines, invoking supernatural aid. Answered or not, they are left there until rained away or covered by notices of later misfortunes.

  Though many entries were used in Where Are the Victors? (1956) and Public People, Private People (1987), a few unused pages remain. Among them are accounts of meeting the writer Kawabata Yasunari and the Zen scholar Suzuki Daisetz that are somewhat different from those in Public People, Private People and Zen Inklings. The continuations about Kawabata occur in their proper chronological places—9 January 1960 and 1 January 1973.

  early spring 1947. The Sumida River, silver in the winter sun, glistened beneath us. We were on the roof of the Asakusa subway terminal tower, looking out over downtown Tokyo, still in ruins, still showing the conflagration of two years earlier, burned concrete black against the lemon yellow of new wood.

  Ueno Subway Station, 1946. stars and stripes

  This had been the amusement quarter of Tokyo. Around the great temple of Kannon, now a blackened, empty square, had grown a warren of bars, theaters, archery stalls, circus tents, peep shows, places where the all-girl opera sang and kicked, where the tattooed gamblers met and bet, where trained dogs walked on hind legs, and Japan’s fattest lady sat in state.

  Now two years after all of this had gone up in flames, after so many of those who worked and played here had burned in the streets or boiled in the canals as the incendiary bombs fell and the B-29s thundered—now, the empty squares were again turning into lanes as tents, reed lean-tos, a few frame buildings began appearing. Girls in wedgies were sitting in front of new tearooms, but I saw no sign of the world’s fattest lady. Perhaps she had bubbled away in the fire.