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Not even the passage of eight decades has dimmed Shizuko Nishio’s memory of the night American bomber planes killed tens of thousands of people in the space of a few hours and turned her city to ash.
In the early hours of 10 March 1945, around 300 B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped 330,000 incendiary devices on Tokyo and killed an estimated 100,000 civilians, in an attack that cost more lives than the atomic bombing, months later, of Nagasaki.
But as survivors prepared to mark the 80th anniversary of the attack, the Tokyo firebombing – the worst conventional bombing of the second world war – barely merits a mention. Some of those survivors are launching one final push for recognition.
The night before the air raid, Nishio, now 86, was looking forward to celebrating her sixth birthday the following day and to starting primary school. As she slept, the air raid sirens sounded. “My father told us to flee to the primary school in front of our house,” Nishio said.
The school’s shelter was already packed, so Nishio and her mother moved to another school basement, leaving her cousin and a nurse behind. The following day, the cousin and nurse were among the charred remains of 200 people who had been “cooked alive” inside the first shelter as fires raged outside. Nishio was the only survivor in her kindergarten class of 20 children.
The B-29s dumped cluster bombs with napalm specially designed with sticky oil to destroy traditional Japanese-style wood-and-paper homes in the crowded Shitamachi downtown neighbourhoods. The bombs destroyed 41 sq km (16 sq miles) of the Japanese capital, turning buildings into an inferno and leaving 1 million people homeless.
Eclipsed by the tragedies visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August the same year, the Tokyo firebombing has been relegated to the darkest recesses of Japan’s collective memory, and virtually ignored by successive governments.
No one denies that the atomic bombings dramatically altered the course of the war. But the Tokyo firebombing, too, marked a sinister escalation in America’s attempt to finally break Japan’s resistance.
As a result, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay ordered low-altitude attacks using incendiaries that would raze entire cities to the ground.
“By burning them down, you would kill workers or de-house them,” said Overy, author of Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan. “You would destroy small factories scattered around the domestic residential zones. And that this would contribute in some way to undermining the Japanese war economy.
“There is no doubt that civilians were a deliberate target.”
‘Our last chance’
Yoshiaki Tanaka, a professor of ancient history at Senshu University in Tokyo, said many people who lived through the bombings still suffered flashbacks and survivor’s guilt.
“Many still experience severe trauma,” says Tanaka, who has met more than 100 survivors over the past 10 years. “Some of them could not even bring themselves to talk about their experiences, so we suggested that they try drawing pictures, and through that some were able to open up.”
There is no national memorial to the firebombing victims, and no official attempt has been made to establish an accurate death toll or to secure testimony from survivors. Those who lived through the bombings are not entitled to compensation from the government.
Since the end of the war, Japanese governments have provided ¥60tn ($405bn) in financial support for military veterans and bereaved families, as well as medical support for survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the civilian victims of the US firebombings of Tokyo and other cities have received nothing.
Japanese courts rejected compensation demands of ¥11m ($74,300) each, arguing that citizens, having been mobilised as part of the war effort, were supposed to endure their suffering. In 2020, a group of MPs proposed a one-time payment of ¥500,000 but the plan was scuppered amid opposition from members of the ruling party.
While Tokyo was home to numerous military installations, the bombing of the city’s eastern neighbourhoods, primarily Sumida ward, was indiscriminate. “The aim was to burn all of Sumida ward to the ground,” Tanaka says.
Tanaka believes that compensation and a public monument, along with the creation of archives of survivors’ testimony, would go some way towards healing the wounds inflicted eight decades ago, and serve as a warning about the horrors of war for future generations.
“It is absolutely right that we honour the victims and survivors of the atomic bombings,” Tanaka said, “but we should also remember the Tokyo firebombing and look ahead to how we must never let something like that happen again.”
Yumi Yoshida, whose parents and sister died in the bombing, is part of a group of survivors demanding that the government recognise their suffering and provide compensation. Given the advanced age of the survivors, and the long wait before the next major anniversary, Yoshida says: “This year will be our last chance.”
Nishio went on to study public health and joined the National Institute of Infectious Diseases. But she was unable to talk about her experiences until after she had retired.
Now, the war in Ukraine is again forcing her to recall the night of terror she experienced as a young child. “I was watching a television report about the situation in Ukraine, and there was a little girl crying in a shelter ... and I thought, ‘This is me.’”
Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed reporting.
