US firebombing of Tokyo which killed 100,000 remains a raw memory

It was just after midnight when the rumble of US B-29 bombers jolted Tokyo awake. The incendiaries that fell from their bellies, full of jellied petroleum, were like nothing anyone had ever seen. They turned canals and rivers into flame and if the jelly stuck to you, it kept burning until flesh turned to bone. "The planes filled the sky like dragonflies," recalls Michiko Kiyoka. "Everywhere you looked there were charred bodies."

Today, Kiyoka, now 91, will join a small group of elderly Tokyoites and mark the death of her father and sister in the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, which killed about 100,000 people in the single night of March 10th. Because men of fighting age were away, most of the victims were women, the elderly and children.

A US survey later concluded that probably more people lost their lives during the raid by 300 bombers than at any single moment in history.

The Tokyo bombing opened an orgy of destruction in the final months of the second World War that included dozens of similar raids on Japanese cities and culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. When the droning of bombers stopped on August 15th, nearly 70 cities had been reduced to rubble and perhaps half a million people, mostly civilians, were dead.

Moral high ground

Some thought that Imperial

Japan

, like Nazi Germany, deserved retribution for the bombing of

Shanghai

and

Chongqing

, the Rape of Nanjing and other war atrocities across Asia. But others asked where had the moral high ground gone since US president

Franklin D Roosevelt

described the 1940 Nazi blitzkrieg of British cities as “inhuman barbarism”?

If the bombing of Dresden a month earlier than Tokyo produced a ripple of public debate in Europe, “no discernible wave of revulsion took place in the US or Europe in the wake of the far greater destruction of Japanese cities”, wrote Mark Selden, a historian at Cornell University. The killing of civilians was on a scale that had no parallel in the history of bombing, he says.

Yet today, unlike in the cases of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, there is no publicly funded museum in Japan’s capital to commemorate the night of March 10th. The Tokyo government, urged on by a small group of private citizens, began compiling an incomplete list of victims in 2010. A small memorial squeezed into a corner of Yokoamicho Park in the city contains their names, next to a charnel house with the mixed ashes of thousands who died.

Tokyo lacked the emotional or financial resources to properly mourn the victims after the war, says Bret Fisk, a Tokyo-based novelist who writes about the 1945 raids. Later, there was no appetite for a political fight with Washington, Japan's new cold war ally. Remarkably, Japan awarded the architect of the 1945 raids, US general Curtis LeMay, its highest prize in 1964 for helping to reconstruct Japan's self-defence forces after the war.

Plans for a museum became bogged down in controversy in the 1990s. Conservatives said the plans, which included descriptions of Japanese war crimes, were “anti-Japanese” and “masochistic”.

Horrors of war

The decision not to proceed infuriated survivors. Tokyo had no stomach for reminding people of the horrors of war, said survivor

Katsumoto Saotome

, who was 12 when the bombers arrived. He set up a private fund to build the Centre of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage near his old neighbourhood, and helped launch a lawsuit for compensation. Much of the testimony from survivors included a common trauma – the smell of burning bodies.

The suit was dismissed in 2009; government lawyers said Japanese civilians had equally experienced severe hardship during a national emergency, so no particular group could receive special treatment, says Cary Karacas, a specialist on aerial bombing at the City University of New York. The argument was known as the “endurance doctrine”.

The dwindling band of survivors of the Great Tokyo Air Raid met at the weekend to demand a proper memorial. Saotome accepts they face an uphill fight. While previous governments lent an ear to the need for an anti-war memorial in the heart of the city, the current administration has no such sympathies, he laments.

He says he still doesn’t even like to say the figure of 100,000 people out loud – it’s too impossibly large: “They were all individuals. They had all been talking to their families hours before they died.”