100,000 People Perished, But Who Remembers?
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Published on Thursday, March 14, 2002 in the New York Times
100,000 People Perished, But Who
Remembers?
by Howard W. French
TOKYO, March 13 — 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.
Under the remains of a tree reared out of
the rubble of the 1945 bombing, Hiroshi
Hoshino, right, described the raid with
two other survivors, Ikuyo Misu, center,
and Kazuo Washizuy, left.
(Stuart Isett/Gamma for The New York
Times)
"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.
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100,000 People Perished, But Who Remembers?
Incinerated, trampled and suffocated, people died on the very
With the firebombings, first day of the incendiary campaign in considerably greater
numbers than were killed in Nagasaki. Yet in contrast to the
we crossed the line
annual memorials to the nuclear victims of Hiroshima and
that we had said was
Nagasaki, the anniversary of the Tokyo attack passes almost
clearly beyond the pale unnoticed.
of civilization. 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.
John Dower
MIT Historian
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
Aftermath of US Firebombing of Tokyo
questions about the
prosecution of the war according to standards that Washington had long denounced as
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100,000 People Perished, But Who Remembers?
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."
Copyright 2002 New York Times Company
###
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100,000 People Perished, But Who Remembers?
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