US president Donald Trump’s threat to bomb Iran, a country of about 93 million people, “back into the Stone Ages” has special resonance in Japan.
Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, later doubled down on the threat on X when he posted: “Back to the Stone Age”.
The phrase is attributed to Curtis LeMay, the US Air Force general responsible for America’s firebombing campaign against Japanese cities in 1945.
In a single attack, 300 American B-29 bombers jolted Tokyo awake at midnight, killing 100,000 people. Because men of fighting age were away, most of the victims were women, the elderly and children.
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US bombs, full of jelly petroleum, were like nothing anyone had seen. They turned rivers into flame and if the jelly stuck to bodies, it burned till flesh turned to bone. American pilots later recalled the sweet smell of seared flesh coming from below.
Tokyo was just one of more than 60 Japanese cities bombed in 1945 – almost every urban centre in the country. By the time the droning of bombers had stopped, up to half a million people were dead.
LeMay later reportedly mused to his bombing crews that had United States lost the war then they would have been tried as war criminals. Instead, he was promoted to Air Force Chief of Staff during the Vietnam War, where he drove similar tactics against the communist north.
In his 1965 book, Mission with LeMay, he wrote: “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” The US bombing campaign killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians.
Remarkably, Japan awarded LeMay its highest prize in 1964 for helping to reconstruct the Japanese Self-Defence Forces after the war.
Japan is regularly invoked in America’s contemporary wars. Last year, during the first US strikes on Iran, Trump compared them to the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “That hit ended the war,” he said.
Questioned this year about whether the US’s support for Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza aligned with Christian values, US senator Lindsey Graham said: “Just flatten it. We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo.”
At a White House meeting with Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi last month, Trump made a now-notorious jibe about Japan’s attack on the US’s Pacific fleet in December 1941 that drew the United States into the second World War.
Responding to a question from a Japanese reporter about why he did not share the decision to attack Iran with the US’s allies, Trump said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
Trump may not be aware that the Japanese leaders who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor were subsequently killed or executed by US forces. Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during the attack, was convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1948.
Micheál Martin is one of many world leaders who have criticised Trump’s threats to bomb Iran.
“Every person involved in war has to prioritise civilian protection and innocent civilians,” the Taoiseach told Newstalk radio. “We all know that the Iranian regime was a very oppressive one. But this war is creating death, destruction to people in Iran who had no act or part in the regime.”
There is still no publicly funded museum in Japan to commemorate the victims of the US wartime incendiary campaign.
Tokyo initially lacked the emotional or financial resources to mourn the victims properly. Later, there was no appetite for a political fight with Washington, Japan’s new Cold War ally. There is little incentive for US to remind people either, unless it is to threaten enemies.
A small memorial squeezed into a corner of Yokoamicho Park in Tokyo contains the names of many victims, next to a charnel house with the mixed ashes of thousands who died.
In the US, millions of people annually visit the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to see B-29 bomber Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Tokyo, a private museum dedicated to the victims of the US firebombing might get a few hundred visitors a year.
