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ARTS & SOCIETY
HISTORY
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Burning Memories
Tokyo reflects on the night 50 years ago
That U.S. bombers set it ablaze
By Steven L. Herman
04/13/1995
Far Eastern Economic Review
Page 40
(Copyright (c) 1995, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.)
The night of March 9, 1945, began typically enough for war-weary Tokyo
residents. They went to bed hungry, the distant wailing of air-raid
sirens lulling them to sleep. But World War II was about to rouse them violently from their fitful
dreams into a waking nightmare. Before the new day dawned, a United
States air-raid killed or injured as many as 200,000 people. It
obliterated a quarter of all Tokyo's buildings, leaving more than a
million people homeless.
The Americans dispatched the first wave of more than 300 bombers from
Guam, Saipan and the Tinian Islands, 2,500 kilometres south of Tokyo.
Each plane dropped 180 oil-gel sticks, less than a metre long, on the
tightly knit neighbourhoods of wooden houses. Then two waves of planes
emptied their bays of a lethal cargo: napalm. The resulting inferno
unleashed hell on earth. Kiyoko Kawasaki, then a 36-year-old mother, remembers running into
the street with two buckets on her head for protection, walking into a
sea of fire and seeing burning bodies floating in the Sumida River. "The
prostitutes who hung out by the riverbank jumped into a nearby pond,"
she recalled. "But the pond was boiling so they all died." Kyoko Arai was just a middle-school student when she witnessed her
neighbourhood burn to the ground in the firebombing. She watched people
perish when dancing fireballs set their hair alight. Worse, she
remembers mothers running into the air-raid shelters with babies in
their arms. "They would try to breast-feed the babies, but actually the
babies were dead," Arai said. "Some of the mothers went crazy from the
shock." For survivors, the misery was just beginning. Takae Fujiki, then a
15-year-old high-school student, recalls being "chased" by the bombers.
She says they hunted down fleeing civilians to deliberately drop bombs
on them. And they napalmed the rivers to cut off an escape route, Fujiki
says. "It was obvious they were trying to kill as many of us as
possible." In the months leading up to the unprecedented atomic bombings, the
Americans hammered the Japanese. Even on August 6, 1945 -- the day the
U.S. unleashed the first atomic horror on Hiroshima -- Masao Kunihiro's
Kobe neighbourhood was firebombed, the third time that year. Kunihiro's
next-door neighbour, a mathematics teacher, died in the blast. "There was this little dog, all skin and bones, who came to lick up
the blood . . . This was too much for me to take," says Kunihiro, who
was 15 at the time. "That experience made me a pacifist." He grew up to
become a prominent Socialist Party member of parliament -- and a leading
Japanese voice of peace. When asked who is to blame for the deaths, Kunihiro answers without
hesitation. "The Americans and British learned this brutal practice of
bombing non-combatants from the Japanese," he says. "The Japanese had
already conducted the bombings of Nanking and Chungking." Few young Japanese learn about the firebombings at home; their
parents and grandparents don't want to share the nightmares of 50 years
ago. But for Katsumoto Saotome, that fateful night in Tokyo in 1945 has
become an obsession. Saotome, who was 12 at the time, recalls seeing the
B29s flying so low that his burning neighbourhood's flames were
reflected in their fuselages. "They looked like tropical fish," says
Saotome, now a World War II lecturer at Chiba National University who
has written dozens of historical novels about the war years. "Those who
died cannot talk, so I want to tell the facts about what really
happened. I write about all of this for future peace." Tokyo has no permanent museum to expose latter generations to the
city's wartime ordeal. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the
firebombings, Tokyo's Edo Museum has set up a temporary display. Since
it opened in February, thousands have seen video-taped testimonials and
artefacts, including shell fragments, military clothes, propaganda
posters and toys. Saotome would have preferred a more graphic display at the Edo
Museum. He believes it should show explicitly that the initial Tokyo
raids were an "unpardonable outrage." (No one will know exactly how many
died -- estimates range from 88,000 to 200,000. Thousands of bodies were
never found, and many neighbourhoods' family records were incinerated.)
Most historians agree that the March 10 inferno killed as many Japanese
as the subsequent atomic bombing of Hiroshima. "It was all Hirohito's fault," says Sozo Matsuura, making a rare
reference to the late emperor by name and an even rarer condemnation of
the man who was revered as a god during the war. As head of the Tokyo
Firebombing Raid Remembrance Organization, Matsuura was a driving force
behind the Edo Museum exhibition. He was 30 when Tokyo was incinerated.
Now old and still angry, he believes young people shouldn't just skim
through history books or glean history from TV. That's why his
organization painstakingly gathered the information and stories that
form the exhibit's core. Some Japanese might blame Hirohito for starting the war. But most
historians blame U.S. Gen. Curtis LeMay (better remembered for his later
threat to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age) for targeting Japanese
civilians for firebombing. Two days before the attack, he told his
bomber crews that they would be delivering "the biggest firecracker the
Japanese have ever seen." Later, he showed no remorse for the Tokyo
raids. In war, LeMay once said, "no matter how you slice it, you're
going to kill an awful lot of civilians." Rinjiro Sodei, a professor of American politics at Hosei University,
labels LeMay "the executioner of Tokyo." "It was a systematic bombing
designed in such a way that no one could escape," Sodei says. "It was
really aimed at mass killing." The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey records
from the time lend credence to his claim. They conclude that "probably
more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than
at any time in the history of man." A half a century later, several of the U.S. military who took part in
the firebombings returned to a radically different Tokyo. At a memorial
service, Earl Johnson, who eventually rose to the rank of major general,
justified the attack. He told an audience of correspondents: "If that's
what it took to win, that's what should have been done." Crew member Alfred Tsang, whose mother lived in Japanese-occupied
Chinese territory during the war, says flying over a flaming Tokyo was
like watching a scene from a movie. "Those missions were no more
realistic than my grandson's airplane game on the computer," he wrote in
the 50th anniversary commemorative booklet compiled by the Tokyo
Metropolitan Government. For the past five years, the city has designated March 10 "Peace
Day." This year, Governor Shunichi Suzuki told an audience gathered at a
ceremony that the firebombings "remind us of the cruelty and misery of
war." U.S. Ambassador Walter Mondale was among those in the packed
Hibiya Civic Centre listening to the governor's speech. Although the
former vice-president was not invited to speak, he told reporters
afterwards: "I wanted to come here to say how sorry we are for how
people had to suffer and the destruction here." Despite the havoc the U.S. wreaked, few Japanese express hatred
towards the Americans. Some even show a degree of understanding. Ken
Urushibara, a translator for the International Parliamentarians Union,
remembers Tokyo skies painted red from the firebombings and the hunger
pangs he felt as a malnourished schoolboy. But he views the experience
in a historical context. If they had had the chance, the Japanese would
have burned down American cities, too, he feels. "And if the Japanese
had developed an A-bomb, they would have used it." But some occupation-era Americans themselves have trouble
rationalizing their countrymen's wartime behaviour. "It was totally
inhumane," says Richard Finn, professor emeritus at the American
University's School of International Service in Washington. Finn, who
helped write the Japanese Constitution as part of the Occupation force,
calls the initial March firebombing the "first action by the Army Air
Force to carry out murder bombings of civilian targets." For him and
many others, it looms as large as Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a bloody
stain on the pages of American history. --- Steven L. Herman is a writer and broadcaster based in Tokyo.
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