The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 12 | Issue 3 | Number 4 | Jan 13, 2014

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Bombs Bursting in Air: State and citizen responses to the USfirebombing and Atomic bombing of Japan あぁ、宙に響きわたる爆音　米国の空襲、原爆投下に対する国家と市民の反応

Mark Selden

Then conquer we must, when our cause it isjust,And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."And the star-spangled banner in triumph shallwaveO'er the land of the free and the home of thebrave!

I. US Firebombing and Atomic Bombing ofJapan

This paper assesses and compares the impactand historical significance of the firebombingand atomic bombing of Japanese cities in thehistory of war and the history of disaster.Japan's decision to surrender, pivoting onissues of firebombing and atomic bombing,Soviet entry into the war, and the origins ofSoviet-American confrontation, is the mostfiercely debated subject in twentieth centuryAmerican global history. The surrenderquestion, however, is addressed only in passinghere. The focus is rather on the human andsocial consequences of the bombings, and theirlegacy in the history of warfare and historicalmemory in the long twentieth century. Part oneprovides an overview of the calculus thatculminated in the final year of the war in a USstrategy centered on the bombing of civiliansand assesses its impact in shaping the globalorder. Part two examines the bombing inJapanese and American historical memoryincluding history, literature, commemorationand education. What explains the power of the

designation of the postwar as the atomic erawhile the area bombing of civilians by fire andnapalm, which would so profoundly shape thefuture of warfare in general, American wars inparticular, faded to virtual invisibility inJapanese, American and global consciousness?

Wor ld War I I was a landmark in thedevelopment and deployment of technologies ofmass destruction associated with air power,notably the B-29 bomber, napalm, firebombing, and the atomic bomb. In Japan, theUS air war reached peak intensity with areabombing and climaxed with the atomicbombing of Japanese cities between the nightof March 9-10 and the August 15, 1945surrender.

The strategic and ethical implications andhuman consequences of the nuclear bombing ofHiroshima and Nagasaki have generated a vast,contentious literature. By contrast, the USdestruction of more than sixty Japanese citiesprior to Hiroshima has been slighted, at leastuntil recently, both in the scholarly literaturesin English and Japanese and in popularconsciousness. It has been overshadowed bythe atomic bombing and by heroic narratives ofAmerican conduct in the "Good War" that hasbeen at the center of American nationalconsciousness thereafter.2Arguably, however,the central breakthroughs that wouldcharacterize the American way of warsubsequently occurred in area bombing ofnoncombatants prior to the atomic bombing ofHiroshima and Nagasaki. A.C. Graylingexplains the different responses to firebombingand atomic bombing this way:

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. . . the frisson of dread created bythe thought of what atomicweaponry can do affects those whocontemplate it more than thosewho actually suffer from it; forwhether it is an atom bomb ratherthan tons of high explosives andincendiaries that does the damage,not a jot of suffering is added to itsvictims that the burned and buried,the dismembered and blinded, thedying and bereaved of Dresden orHamburg did not feel."3

Grayling does, however, go on to note thedifferent experiences of survivors of the twotypes of bombing, particularly as a result ofradiation symptoms from the atomic bomb,with added dread in the case of the Hiroshimaand Nagasaki hibakusha , not only forthemselves but also for future generations.

If other nations, notably Germany, England andJapan led the way in area bombing duringWorld War II, US targeting of entire cities withconventional weapons emerged in 1944-45 on ascale that quickly dwarfed all previousdestruction. Targeting for the most part thenand subsequently essentially defenselesspopulations, it was an approach that combinedtechnological predominance with a priority onminimization of US casualties. This wouldbecome a hallmark of the American way of warin campaigns from Korea and Indochina to theGulf and Iraq Wars. The result would be thedecimation of noncombatant populations andextraordinary "kill ratios" favoring the USmilitary. Yet for the US, victory in subsequentwars-Korea, Indochina, Afghanistan and Iraqbeing the most notable-would proveextraordinarily elusive. This is one reason why,six decades on, World War II retains its aurafor Americans as the "Good War", a conceptionthat renders difficult coming to terms with themassive bombing of civilians in the final year ofthe war.

As Michael Sherry and Cary Karacas havepointed out for the US and Japan respectively,prophecy preceded practice in the destructionof Japanese cities. Sherry observes that "WaltDisney imagined an orgiastic destruction ofJapan by air in his 1943 animated featureVictory Through Air Power (based on AlexanderP. De Seversky's 1942 book)," while Karacasnotes that the best-selling Japanese writerUnna Juzo, beginning in his early 1930s "air-defense novels", anticipated the destruction ofTokyo by bombing.4

Curtis LeMay was appointed commander of the21st Bomber Command in the Pacific on January20, 1945. Capture of the Marianas, includingGuam, Tinian and Saipan in summer 1944 hadplaced Japanese cities within effective range ofthe B-29 "Superfortress" bombers, whileJapan's depleted air and naval power and ablockade that cut off oil supplies left it virtuallydefenseless against sustained air attack.

The full fury of firebombing and napalm wasunleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyofrom the Marianas.5 Their mission was toreduce much of the city to rubble, kill itscitizens, and instill terror in the survivors.Stripped of their guns to make more room forbombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000feet to evade detection, the bombers carriedtwo kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oilgel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable ofstarting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 peraircraft in addition to a few high explosives todeter firefighters.6 The attack on an area thatthe US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated tobe 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyondthe wildest dreams of air force planners.

Nature reinforced man's handiwork in the formof akakaze, the red wind that swept withhurricane force across the Tokyo plain andpropelled firestorms with terrifying speed andintensity. The wind drove temperatures up to

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eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, creatingsuperheated vapors that advanced ahead of theflames, killing or incapacitating their victims."The mechanisms of death were so multiple andsimultaneous-oxygen deficiency and carbonmonoxide poisoning, radiant heat and directflames, debris and the trampling feet ofstampeding crowds-that causes of death werelater hard to ascertain . . ."7

The Strategic Bombing Survey provided atechnical description of the firestorm and itseffects on Tokyo:

The chief characteristic of theconflagration . . . was the presenceof a fire front, an extended wall offire moving to leeward, precededby a mass of pre-heated, turbid,burning vapors . . . . The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a milefrom the fire, increased to anes t ima ted 55 m i l e s a t t heperimeter, and probably morewithin. An extended fire sweptover 15 square miles in 6 hours . . .. The area of the fire was nearly100 percent burned; no structureor its contents escaped damage.

Aerial photo of Tokyo after the bombing ofMarch 9-10. US National Archives

The survey concluded-plausibly, but only forevents prior to August 6, 1945-that

"probably more persons lost theirlives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hourperiod than at any time in thehistory of man. People died fromextreme heat , from oxygendeficiency, from carbon monoxideasphyxiation, from being trampledbeneath the feet of stampedingcrowds, and from drowning. Thelargest number of victims were themost vulnerable: women, childrenand the elderly."

How many people died on the night of March9-10 in what flight commander Gen. ThomasPower termed "the greatest single disasterincurred by any enemy in military history?" TheStrategic Bombing Survey estimated that87,793 people died in the raid, 40,918 wereinjured, and 1,008,005 people lost their homes.The Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000killed and 125,000 wounded. According toJapanese police statistics, the 65 raids on Tokyobetween December 6, 1944 and August 13,1945 resulted in 137,582 casualties, 787,145homes and buildings destroyed, and 2,625,279people displaced.8 The figure of roughly100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese andAmerican authorities, both of whom may havehad reasons of their own for minimizing thedeath toll, seems to me arguably low in light ofpopulation density, wind conditions, andsurvivors' accounts.9 With an average of103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peaklevels as high as 135,000 per square mile, thehighest density of any industrial city in theworld, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo weredestroyed on a night when fierce windswhipped the flames and walls of fire blockedtens of thousands who attempted to flee. Anestimated 1.5 million people lived in the burnedout areas. Given the near total inability to fightfires of the magnitude produced that night10, itis possible, given the interest of the authoritiesto minimize the scale of death and injury andthe total inability of the civil defense efforts to

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respond usefully to the firestorm, to imaginethat casualties may have been several timeshigher than the figures presented on both sidesof the conflict. Stated differently, my view isthat it is likely that the number of fatalities wassubstantially higher: this is an issue that meritsthe attention of researchers, beginning with theunpublished records of the US StrategicBombing Survey.

The single effective Japanese governmentmeasure taken to reduce the slaughter of USbombing was the 1944 evacuation to thecountryside of 400,000 third to sixth gradechildren from major cities, 225,000 of themfrom Tokyo, with 300,000 first to third gradersfollowing in early 1945.11

No previous or subsequent conventionalbombing raid anywhere ever came close togenerating the toll in death and destruction ofthe great Tokyo raid of March 9-10. Followingthe Tokyo raid of March 9-10, the firebombingwas extended nationwide. In the ten-day periodbeginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombsdestroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya,Osaka and Kobe. Overall, bombing strikesdestroyed 40 percent of the 66 Japanese citiestargeted, with total tonnage dropped on Japanincreasing from 13,800 tons in March to 42,700tons in July.12 If the bombing of Dresdenproduced a ripple of public debate in Europe,no discernible wave of revulsion, not to speakof protest, took place in the US or Europe inthe wake of the far greater destruction ofJapanese cities and the slaughter of civilianpopulations on a scale that had no parallel inthe history of bombing.

Viewed from another angle, it would be worthinquiring about Japanese responses to thebombing. Japanese ideological mobilization andcontrol was such that there are no signs ofresistance to the government's suicidalperpetuation of the war at any time during thebombing campaign. Whatever the suffering,most Japanese then and subsequently appear to

have accepted the legitimacy of the decision tocontinue fighting a hopeless war, a theme towhich I return below. Overall, by Sahr Conway-Lanz's calculation, the US firebombingcampaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67cities, killed more than 300,000 people andinjured an additional 400,000, figures thatexclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima andNagasaki.13 Karacas and Fisk conclude that thefirebombing raids "destroyed a significantpercentage of most of Japan's cities, wiped outa quarter of all housing in the country, madenine million people homeless, and killed at least187,000 civilians, and injured 214,000 more,"while suggesting that the actual figures arelikely higher.14

Throughout the spring and summer of 1945 theUS air war in Japan reached an intensity that isstill perhaps unrivaled in the magnitude ofhuman slaughter.15 That moment was a productof the combinat ion of technologicalbreakthroughs, American nationalism, and theerosion of moral and political scruplespertaining to the killing of civilians. The point isnot to separate the United States from otherparticipants in World War II, but to suggestthat there is more common ground in the warpolicies of Japan and the United States in theirdisregard of citizen victims than is normallyrecognized in the annals of history andjournalism.

The targeting for destruction of entirepopulations, whether indigenous peoples,religious infidels, or others deemed inferior,threatening or evil, may be as old as humanhistory, but the forms it takes are as new as thelatest technologies of destruction and strategicinnovation, of which firebombing and nuclearweapons are particularly notable in definingthe nature of war in the long twentiethcentury.16 The most important way in whichWor ld War I I shaped the mora l andtechnological tenor of mass destruction was theerosion in the course of war of the stigmaassociated with the systematic targeting of

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civil ian populations from the air, andelimination of the constraints, which for someyears had restrained certain air powers fromarea bombing. What was new was both thescale of killing made possible by the newtechnologies and the routinization of masskilling of non-combatants, or state terrorism. Ifarea bombing remained controversialthroughout much of World War II, something tobe concealed or denied by its practitioners, bythe end it would become the acknowledgedcenterpiece of war making, emblematic aboveall of the American way of war even as thenature of the targets and the weapons weretransformed by new technologies andconfronted new forms of resistance. In this Iemphasize not US uniqueness but the quotidiancharacter of targeting civilians foundthroughout the history of colonialism andcarried to new heights by Germany, Japan,Britain and the US during and after World WarII.

Concerted efforts to protect civilians from theravages of war peaked in the late nineteenthcentury, with the League of Nations followingWorld War I, and again in the aftermath ofWorld War II with the founding of the UnitedNations, German and Japanese War CrimesTribunals, and the 1949 Geneva Accords and its1977 Protocol.17 The Nuremberg Indictmentdefined "crimes against humanity" as "murder,extermination, enslavement, deportation, andother inhumane acts committed against anycivilian population, before or during the war,"language that could be interpreted to resonatepowerfully with the area bombing campaignsconducted not only of Japan and Germany butalso by Britain and the US.18 For the most part,these efforts have done little to stay the hand ofpower, though they have sometimes arousedpublic consciousness and provided a referencepoint for campaigns aiming to protect civiliansfrom destruction. And while the atomic bombwould leave a deep imprint on the collectiveconsciousness of the twentieth century, in mostcountries memory of the area bombings and

firebombing of major cities soon disappearedfrom the consciousness of all but the survivingvictims and their families.

The US has not unleashed an atomic bomb inthe decades since the end of World War II,although it has repeatedly threatened their usein Korea, in Vietnam and elsewhere. Itnevertheless incorporated annihilation ofnoncombatants into the bombing programs thathave been integral to the successive"conventional wars" that it has wagedsubsequently. With area bombing at the core ofits strategic agenda, US attacks on cities andnoncombatants would run the gamut fromfirebombing, napalming, and cluster bombingto the use of chemical defoliants and depleteduranium weapons and bunker buster bombs inan ever expanding circle of destruction whoserecent technological innovations center on theuse of drones controlling the skies and bringingterror to inhabitants below.19

Places the United States Has Bombed,1854-Ongoing. Artist elin o'Hara slavick21

Less noted then and since were the systematicbarbarities perpetrated by Japanese forcesagainst resistant villagers, though thisproduced the largest number of the estimatedten to thirty million Chinese who lost their livesin the war, a number that far surpasses the halfmillion or more Japanese noncombatants whodied at the hands of US bombing, and may have

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exceeded Soviet losses to Nazi invasionconventionally estimated at 20 million lives.22 Inthat and subsequent wars it would be thesignature barbarities such as the NanjingMassacre, the Bataan Death March, and themassacres at Nogunri and My Lai rather thanthe quotidian events that defined thesystematic daily and hourly killing, whichwould attract sustained attention, spark bittercontroversy, and shape historical memory.

World War II remains indelibly engraved inAmerican memory as the "Good War" andindeed, in confronting the war machines ofNazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the UnitedStates played a critical role in defeatingaggressors and opening the way for a wave ofdecolonization that swept the globe insubsequent decades. It was also a war thatcatapulted the United States to globalsupremacy, and established the institutionalfoundations for the global projection ofAmerican power in the form of a vast array ofinsular territories and a network of permanentand ever growing military bases as well asunrivaled technological supremacy and militarypower.23 Against these factors we turn to aconsideration of the US firebombing andatomic bombing of Japan in history, memory,and commemoration.

II. The Firebombing and Atomic Bombingof Japanese Cities: History, Memory,Culture, Commemoration

A. The US occupation and the shaping ofJapanese and American memory of the bombing

Nagasaki mushroom cloud. US NationalArchives

Basic decisions by the Japanese authorities andby Washington and the US occupationauthorities shaped Japanese and Americanperceptions and memories of the firebombingand atomic bombing. Throughout the six monthperiod from the March 9 attack that destroyedTokyo until August 15, 1945, and above all inthe wake of the US victory in Okinawa in mid-June 1945, a Japanese nation that was defeatedin a l l bu t name con t inued to spurnunconditional surrender, eventually acceptingthe sacrifice of more than half a millionJapanese subjects in Okinawa and Japan tosecure a single demand: the safety of theemperor. In preserving Hirohito on the throneand choosing to rule indirectly through theJapanese government, the US did more thanplace severe constraints on the democraticrevolution that it sought to launch underoccupation auspices. It also assured that therewould be no significant

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Hiroshima after the bomb. US NationalArchives

Japanese debate over war responsibility or thenature of the imperial or imperial-militarysystem in general, and the decision to sacrificeOkinawa and Japan's cities with massive loss oflife in particular.

From the outset of the occupation, the USimposed tight censorship with respect to thebombing, particularly the atomic bombing. Thisincluded prohibition of publication ofphotographic and artistic images of the effectsof the bombing or criticism of it. Indeed, underUS censorship, there would be no Japanesepublic criticism of either the firebombing or theatomic bombing. While firebombing neveremerged as a major subject of Americanreflection or self-criticism, the atomic bombingdid. Of particular interest is conservative andmilitary criticism of the atomic bombing,including that of Navy Secretary JamesForrestal, and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, JohnFoster Dulles and a range of Christian thinkerssuch as Reinhold Niebuhr. Thus Sec. of WarHenry Stimson worried about the "growingfeeling of apprehension and misgiving as to theeffect of the atomic bomb even in our owncountry."24

As Ian Buruma observes, "News of the terribleconsequences of the atom bomb attacks on

Japan was deliberately withheld from theJapanese public by US military censors duringthe Allied occupation-even as they sought toteach the natives the virtues of a free press.Casualty statistics were suppressed. Film shotby Japanese cameramen in Hiroshima andNagasaki after the bombings was confiscated.Hiroshima, the famous account written by JohnHersey for The New Yorker, had a huge impactin the US, but was banned in Japan. As [John]Dower says: 'In the localities themselves,suffering was compounded not merely by theunprecedented nature of the catastrophe…butalso by the fact that public struggle with thistraumatic experience was not permitted.'"25 TheUS occupation authorities maintained amonopoly on scientific and medical informationabout the effects of the atomic bomb throughthe work of the Atomic Bomb CasualtyCommission, which treated the data gatheredin studies of hibakusha as privi legedinformation rather than making the resultsavailable for the treatment of victims orproviding financial or medical support to aidvictims. The US also stood by official denial ofthe ravages associated with radiation.26 Finally,not only was the press tightly censored onatomic issues, but literature and the arts werealso subject to rigorous control prior.

Atomic Bomb survivors at Miyuki Bridge,Hiroshima, two kilometers from GroundZero. Aug. 6, 1945. Photo by MatsushigeY o s h i t o . U n d e r U S c e n s o r s h i p ,

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Matsushige's photos could not bepublished until 1952 following the end ofthe occupation.

This did not mean suppression of al linformation about the atomic bombing or thefirebombings. Washington immediatelyannounced the atomic bomb's destruction ofHiroshima and Nagasaki and released theiconic photographs of the mushroom cloud. Itsoon made available images of the totaldevastation of Hiroshima and Nagasakidepicting the ravages of cities reduced torubble and devoid of human life, therebydemonstrating the Promethean power of thevictor.

The US would celebrate the power of the bombin powerful visual statements of the birth of thenuclear era that would be directed at the entireworld on August 6, on August 9 and in thedecades that followed, both in officiallycontrolled photographic images and inprivileged reportage, notably that of New YorkTimes science reporter William R. Laurence.What was banned under the occupation wereclose-up images of victims whether of thefirebombing or the atomic bombing capturedon film by Japanese photographers, that is, thehuman face of the atomic holocaust.

Bodies of people trapped and burned asthey fled through a street during theattack on the night of March 9-10.Photograph by Ishikawa Koyo.

The Japanese authorities had reasons of theirown for highlighting atomic bomb imagerywhile suppressing imagery of the firebombing.They include the fact that the dominantvictimization narrative was preferable tohaving to engage war issues centered onJapanese aggression and war atrocities.Moreover, Japanese authorities preferred toemphasize the atomic bomb over the firebombing for at least two reasons. First, itsuggested that there was little that Japaneseauthorities or any nation could have done in theface of such overwhelming technologicalpower. The firebombing, by contrast raiseduncomfortable issues about the government'sdecision to perpetuate the war through sixmonths of punishing bombing with noalternative except defeat. Second, as CaryKaracas has argued, Japan's bombing ofChongqing and other Chinese cities, includingthe use of Unit 731's bio-weapons, raiseduncomfortable questions about its ownbombing.27

B. Firebombing and atomic bombing inJapanese literature and art

The atomic bomb experience gave rise to anoutpouring of Japanese (and later international)literary and artistic responses that rank amongthe outstanding cultural achievements of thetwentieth century extending across multiplegenres and giving rise to a literary genre ofGenbaku bungaku or atomic-bomb literature.These include haiku, tanka and linked poetry,short stories, novellas and children's stories,dramas for tv and stage, manga, f i lm,animation, memoirs, diaries, biographies andautobiographies, historical and journalisticaccounts, photographs and photographicessays, murals, paintings, and drawings. Whilemany of the signature works are by survivors,others constitute literary and artistic responsesby a range of writers and artists, Japanese,American and international, who haveresponded to the bomb and the plight of thevictims in the decades since the bombing.28

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Among the authors, artists, photographers,filmmakers, anime and manga artists are manyof Japan's most eminent literary and artisticlights. A partial list would include KuriharaSadako and Toge Sankichi (poets), IbuseMasuji, Oe Kenzaburo and Hayashi Kyoko(novelists), Nakazawa Keiji (manga artist),Maruki Iri and Toshi (painters), Kurosawa Akiraand Miyazaki Hayao (f i lm directors),Matsushige Toshio, Yamahata Yosuke,Fukushima Kikuj i ro and Domon Ken(photographers) , and Nagai Takashi(physician). And among international artists:Allen Ginsberg (poet), Stanley Kramer (filmdirector), John Hersey (writer), MargueriteDuras (writer), Robert Lifton (psychiatrist), andAlain Resnais (film director). No less important,and no less vivid and important, than theseliterary, artistic and scholarly contributions arethe words and images provided by children andcitizen hibakusha inscribing their personalexperiences of the bomb, most famouslyUnforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by AtomicBomb Survivors.29 This literary and artisticoutpouring perhaps has no parallel in the rangeand emotional depth of the responses to atwentieth century historical event. Indeed,viewed collectively, they constitute among themost important contributions to peace thoughtthrough the arts in human history. If we live inan era that may be called the Nuclear Age, theliterary, artistic and citizen representations ofthe bomb and the hibakusha experienceconstitute among humanities' most preciouscreative achievements, ones that open the pathto an epoch of peace and human fulfillmentrather than the war and destruction that manyhave seen as the dominant legacy of the longtwentieth century.

Here I wish to pose a difficult question forwhich I have no confident answer. We havenoted that the cumulative death and injury tollsas well as the destruction of the builtenvironment from area bombing in Europe andJapan exceeded those of the atomic bombing.Moreover, area bombing not only preceded the

atomic bombing but came to be legitimized inthe sense of being subject to no significantinternational legal challenges as were, forexample, the use of forced labor or the sexualslaves of the Japanese military known as thecomfort women. And, above all this became acore element of the American military in eachof the major wars fought in the six decadessince World War II. Yet, although journalists,photographers and historians recorded theevents, and although the US Strategic BombingSurvey interviewed survivors of thefirebombing, when we turn to literature and thearts in Japan and internationally, including theUnited States, these cataclysmic events havebarely been noted in the decades since 1945.

Among notable exceptions to the literary andartistic silencing of the firebombing, perhapsbest known in both Japan and the United Statesis Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka),Nosaka Akiyuki's semi-autobiographical novelmade into a successful 1988 film directed byTakahata Isao and beautifully animated byStudio Ghibli. Set in Kobe, it records theterrifying bombing through the eyes of 14-yearold Seita and his 4-year old sister Setsuko, wholose their mother in the flames and themselvesdie in poverty in the aftermath of Japan'ssurrender. 3 0 The surviving victims offirebombing doubtless recorded theirexperiences in diaries, poems and memoirs. Yetnearly all of these responses to the firebombingremain confined to the private sector, theindividuals and families of their creators.

Grave of the Fireflies

How are we to comprehend the fact that while66 Japanese cities were leveled by firebombing,taking the lives of several hundred thousand

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Japanese, the experience generated relativelylittle literature or art, and that little, with fewexceptions, was neither noted nor longremembered compared to the monumentalproduction derived from the Hiroshima andNagasaki experience? How explain thedifference despite the fact that censorshipapplied to both the literature and art of thefirebombing and the atomic bombing duringthe occupation? Clearly multiple factors wereand are at work:

The United States, in substantiating its claim asthe unrivaled superpower, highlighted theatomic bomb as the critical ingredient inJapan's surrender. It is worth recallinghowever, that six months of firebombing hadlaid waste to Japan and revealed the inability todefend the skies, but it had failed to forcesurrender. The atomic bombs furtherunderlined the nature of American power, butit is important to note what the official USnarrative elides: the Soviet invasion ofManchuria on August 8, one day beforeNagasaki, was critical to the Japanesesurrender calculus.

With more than 200,000 dead by the end of1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and withmany more dying in subsequent years, nuclearweapons emerged as the nonpareil weapon ofmass destruction, their power magnified by themystique of radiation. This theme would recurin fantasy and nightmare throughout thepostwar, shaping the Japanese and Americanimagination, and indeed the global imaginary.It would shape feature film representations ofthe bomb as well as the fantasies played out inthe press, as in the fears of a nuclear attack onNew York City, and in literature and art.31 HereDr. Strangelove is perhaps the signatureinternational creation, but equally importantare the fantasies played out in the press, as inthe fears of a nuclear attack on New York City.In addition, the high degree of US censorshipand disinformation, including official denial ofthe effects of radiation, had the effect of

focusing attention on understanding a weaponthat continued to kill with the passage of time.The fact that the Soviet-American conflict, thedefining geopolitical clash of the postwar era,was organized around nuclear rivalry had theeffect of drawing further attention to nuclearissues: here both the Pentagon and the worldpeace movement were equally fixated onatomic weapons despite the fact conventionalbombing was the everyday reality of allsubsequent wars fought by the United Statesand others.

Subsequent developments powerfully drewattention to the atomic bomb. The LuckyDragon #5 Incident of 1954, resulting in theirradiation of 23 Japanese fishermen (and thedeath of one) caught in the US hydrogen bombtest at Bikini, ignited the world anti-nuclearmovement with Japan as the epicenter ofprotest from that time forward.32 The followingyear, 1955, the Hiroshima Memorial Museumwas established, giving the anti-nuclearmovement a highly visible shrine backed by theHiroshima and Japanese governments.Hiroshima would become a mecca for Japaneseand international visitors as a site for peaceeducation and a symbol of peace as well as ofJapanese suffering. (Nagasaki would build itsown memorial museum, but both Japanese andinternational attention have always focused onHiroshima).

The Japanese government also underlined thedistinction between nuclear and firebombingsurvivors not only in its lavish funding for themuseums in the two cities, but by makingavailable funds to provide medical care for thevictims of the atomic bombing. It is worthunderlining the fact that it was the Japanesegovernment and not the US government thatprovided, and continues to provide, substantialfunds for the hibakusha. The larger numbers ofsurviving victims of firebombing never receivedeither recognition or official support fromnational or local government for medical careor property losses, and they certainly never

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drew either Japanese or international attention.In short, while the surviving victims of theatomic bomb were a continuing reminder toJapanese of their victimization, bomb survivorsin other cities were expected to embrace theforward look ing nat iona l agenda o freconstruction to build Japan again into anindustrial power that would rise not under thebanner of the military but under permanent USmilitary occupation, a US nuclear umbrella anda peace constitution.

With the end of the occupation, there was aflourishing of atomic literature and art,including novels, poetry, visual arts andphotography that had previously been censoredand now found a ready reception amongpublishers and readers, conveying withsensitivity, nuance and pathos the nature ofexperiences that had the capacity to deeplymove Japanese and international readers andviewers, often by understatement, or evensilence. Two examples may illustrate the citizenliterary and documentary response.

To the Lost33

Yamada Kazuko

When loquats bloom

When peach blossoms in the peach mountainbloom

When almonds are as big as the tip of the littlefinger

My boys

Please come.

Nagai Kayano (5 at the time of bombing,recalled)

My brother and I were in the mountain housein Koba. My mother came from Nagasaki withclothes.

"Mom, did you bring Kaya-chan's too?" I asked

right away. My mother said, "yes. I brought lotsof Kaya-chan's clothes, too," and stroked myhead.

This was the last time that she stroked me.

My mother said, "When there's no air raid next,come down to Nagasaki again, okay?" And sheleft right away in a great hurry.34

In much of the literature and memoir, as in thefilm, anime, photography and painting, there isan immediacy of the human experience thattranscends argument and debate and conveyspowerful human emotions including deepsympathy for victims, many of them women andchildren. In some can also be found a sense,rarely explicitly stated, of the inhumanity of theassailant.

From "Fire", Second of The HiroshimaPanels by Maruki Iri and Toshi

C. Firebombing and atomic bombing inJapanese and American museums, monumentsand memory

National and local state governments

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everywhere wield important commemorativepowers as one weapon in the nationalistarsenal through their ability to build andfinance museums and monuments that guardpublic memory of critical historical events, yettheir policies may also become the locus ofpublic controversy.

The story line here closely parallels that ofliterature and the arts. The high profile atomicbomb memorial museums at Hiroshima andNagasaki-funded initially primarily byprefectural and city governments butsubsequently lavishly supported by Tokyo inbuilding two enormous national memorial sites-has produced a major, perhaps THE major, siteof national commemoration, mourning, andpublic education in Japan. Indeed, not only arethe memorial museums (notably Hiroshima)among the most important sites of Japan'subiquitous school education trips, they are alsoarguably the single largest international,particularly American, magnet for tourists. Seeh e r e(http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/top_e.html) and h e r e(http://www1.city.nagasaki.nagasaki.jp/peace/english/abm/). A 1994 Atomic Bomb Survivors'A s s i s t a n c e A c t(http://www.hiro-tsuitokinenkan.go.jp/english/about/index.html)set in motion the creation ofnational memorials, which opened on August 1,2002 in Hiroshima and July 2003 in Nagasaki.Its mission: "To pray for peace and pay tributeto the survivors. To collect and provide A-bomb-related information and materials, such asmemoirs of the A-bombing". This meant that, atleast until recently, both memorial museumsprovided no contextualization of the bombing inlight of the history of Japanese colonialism, theinvasion of China and Southeast Asia, orquestions of war atrocities such as the NanjingMassacre or the comfort women. Their missionwas understood to be that of giving voice toJapanese victims of the atomic bombing. Toutcourt. In recent years, both have introducedmaterials on Japan during the fifteen-year war,

with Nagasaki providing a far more extensiveand deeper introduction to the nature ofJapanese colonialism and war at the expense ofAsian people.

What then of the treatment of commemorationof the firebombing that destroyed 66 Japanesecities in 1945? First, it is notable that there isno national or even prefectural site ofcommemoration of the firebombing. Nationaland most local governments-importantexceptions include the cooperation of localgovernments in Nagoya and Osaka withcitizens groups commemorating the bombing-have chosen not to memorialize the hundredsof thousands who died and were injured, andthe millions who lost their homes and wereforced to evacuate as a result of fire bombing35.In striking contrast to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,local and national governments have trainedtheir eyes on the future, rebuilding the citieswhile doing their best to forget the trauma offirebombing and denying official responsibilityfor the victims. To my knowledge, there is nosingle state-sponsored monument to the victimsof the firebombing preserved for reflection oreducation in ways comparable to Hiroshima'satomic dome, which was embraced not only byHiroshima and Tokyo, but was also designatedas a World Heritage site.36

Nevertheless, firebombing has not entirelydisappeared down the memory hole. The mostvisible site, especially for internationalresearchers and visitors, The Tokyo Air Raidand War Damages Resources Center(http://www.tokyo-sensai.net/english_page/index.html) is an invaluable education and researchcenter documenting and exhibiting thefirebombing. Opened in 2002 and expanded in2007, it was built in the absence of directfinancial or logistical support by the Tokyoauthorities. But approximately ten others,notably Peace Aichi and Peace Osaka, allspearheaded by citizens groups, makeimportant contributions to commemoration andthe continued viability of peace thought. While

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all of these are far more modest than theHiroshima and Nagasaki memorials, the TokyoCenter is a substantial resource, and it is freeof government controls. This means inparticular that, under the leadership of writer-researcher peace activist Saotome Katsumoto,it can examine critically not only the USbombing but also the Japanese and Americanwar efforts.37 It cannot, however, gain thecachet of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Centerswith their hundreds of thousands of Japaneseand international visitors and high national andinternational profile.

Nevertheless, the resource base for the studyof the firebombing of Japan, particularly ofTokyo, is growing. Bret Fisk and Cary Karacashave established Japan Air Raids.org, animportant bilingual historical archive includinga range of documents and art pertaining to theUS air raids against Japan including a nearlycomplete set of the 108 reports of the USStrategic Bombing Survey; the 5 volume set ofthe Tokyo Daikushu–Sensaishi("Great Tokyo AirR a i d - W a r D a m a g e D o c u m e n t a t i o n(http://www.japanairraids.org/)"), whichconveys the voices of survivors and muchmore.

Nihei Haruyo, eight years old at the time ofthe Tokyo firebombing, shows the site ofthe bombings at the Tokyo Air-Raid Center(Photograph Satoko Norimatsu)

Comparison with the National Showa MemorialM u s e u m(http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/location/spot/museum/nationalshowa.html) (Showakan) isinstructive. Where the Tokyo Center documentsthe disasters suffered by Tokyo's citizens in thefirebombing that destroyed the city (but not theImperial Palace), the Showakan displays thenation's loyal subjects going about their work,support ing the t roops , engaging inneighborhood fire-fighting drills, raising theirchildren and working to support families andthe war. Calm reigns as every citizen, child,mother, soldier, grandparent follows his or herassignment to the letter. Not a single exhibit(as of 2011) conveys a sense of the terror anddestruction of the bombing or, indeed, any signof disorder.

The result is that the major national sites ofwar memory available to Tokyo's citizens andvisitors are the Yasukuni Shrine and theShowakan, each in its way a monument to theEmperor, to Shinto nationalism, and the wareffort, and each eliding the trauma to whichcitizens of Tokyo and 66 other Japanese citieswere subjected in the final months of the war.

One museum sponsored by the TokyoMetropolitan Government does contain anexhibit on the bombing on its sixth floor. That ist h e E d o - T o k y o M u s e u m(http://www.edo-tokyo-museum.or.jp/english) inSumida Ward at Ryogoku Station which, likeYasukuni and the Showakan, conveys littlesense of terror or destruction that the bombingwrought.

Viewed from another angle, through officialJapan's suppressing or downplaying thefirebombing, America's nuclear supremacyprovides reassurance for Japanese leaderscommitted to maintaining Japan's subordinateposition in the US-Japan alliance in perpetuity:the US nuclear umbrella is the most powerfulguarantee of Japan's security. Thus, in drawingattention to the atomic bomb, Japanese leaders

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are simultaneously reaffirming their corediplomatic choice in the contemporary era.

The issues of Japanese memory and silence onthe bomb invites comparison with thecontroversy in the United States over theSmithsonian exhibition on the fiftiethanniversary of Japan's surrender in 1995. Afuror arose when historians and museum staffcrafted an exhibition that included recognitionof the human toll of the bomb. The controversypivoted around a single powerful image.

Lunchbox of junior high school studentOrimen Shigeru. (Hiroshima PeaceMemorial Museum)

Orimen Shigeru's carbonized lunchbox(http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/virtual/VirtualMuseum_e/visit_e/vit_ex_e/vit_ex4_e.html) wasamong the artifacts found and collected at theHiroshima Memorial Museum. His motherfound the uneaten lunchbox with his body onAugust 9 after three days of searching.

When the exhibitors proposed to include thelunchbox at the Smithsonian, the issue wentviral, culminating in a unanimous Senateresolution which condemned the exhibit in itsentirety. The exhibition eventually went

forward with a single item: The Enola Gay, theB-29 that had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.The lunchbox had the symbolic capacity toundermine the national narrative of patriotism,power and honor by calling to mind the bomb'svictims.38 The result illustrated the immensedifficulty Americans have long faced, andcontinue to face, in finding an appropriateframework for celebrating the moment thatbrought the United States to the pinnacle of itspower.

Many Americans share with the Japanesepeople, and with people throughout much ofthe world, deep sympathy for the victims of theatomic bomb. Carolyn Mavor provides acompelling example of that empatheticunderstanding in her introductory essay to elino'Hara slavick's Bomb After Bomb: A ViolentCartography (pp. 20-21)

I do not understand. I cannotcomprehend the fact that thefamed si lver monster planedropped Little Boy on little boysand little girls, like the beautifultwo-year-old Sadako Sasaki, whowould become the inspirationalpaper-crane-folding, speedrunning, kimono-wearing, peace-loving teenager who f inallysuccumbed to her radiation-poisoning at age fourteen. Obsceneis the fact that the pilot of theplane, Paul Tibbets, had the nameof his mother, Enola Gay, paintedon the nose of the plane, just daysbefore the mission. How could aplane named for one's mother killso many mothers and children?

We reflect on the fact that there is no Sadakoof the firebombing of Japanese cities, nocarbonized lunchbox relic known to the world,or even to Japanese children. Yet there wasprecisely the killing of myriad mothers and

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children in those not quite forgotten raids. Weneed to expand the canvas of our imaginationto encompass a wider range of victims ofAmerican bombing in this and other wars, justas Japanese need to set their experience asbomb victims against the Chinese and Asia-Pacific victims of their war and colonialism.Nor should American responsibility for itsbomb victims end with the recovery of memory.It requires a sensibility embodied in officialapology and reparations for victims, and aconsciousness embodied in public monumentsand national mil i tary pol icies that isfundamentally at odds with Americancelebrations of its wars.

Reflection

This article has sought to understand thepolitical dynamics that l ie behind thedifferential treatment of the firebombing andatomic bombing of Japan in Japan and theUnited States, events that brought disaster tothe Japanese nation, but also brought to an enda bitter war and paved the way for the rebirthof a Japan stripped of its empire (but not itsemperor) and prepared to embark on therebuilding of the nation under Americanauspices. We have been equally interested inthe human consequences of the US targetingcivilian populations for annihilation as a centralstrategy of its airpower from late 1944 and thenature of subsequent ways of war. While theatomic bomb has overshadowed thefirebombing in most realms in the nearly sevendecades since 1945, notably as a major factorin assessing US-Soviet conflict and explainingthe structure of a "Cold War" in world politics,we have shown not only that the firebombingtook a greater cumulative toll in human lifethan the atomic bombs, but importantly that itbecame the core of US bombing strategy fromthat time forward.

We can view this from another angle. Itappears that in the squaring off of the twosuperpowers, mutual targeting with atomic

weapons was the centerpiece of direct conflict,while proxy fights, as in Korea, Vietnam, Iraqand Afghanistan, were fought with bombsranging from firebombs to cluster bombs todefoliants. The drone opens a new page in thishistory of state terror. In each of these, theUnited States essentially monopolized the skiesin the dual sense that it alone carried outmassive bombing, and its own homeland, andeven i ts mil i tary bases in the US andthroughout the world, were never bombed.

This would begin to change in the last decade,culminating in the 9.11 attack on the WorldTrade Center and the Pentagon, instantlyshredding the image of US invulnerability toforeign attack short of nuclear attack, andgiving rise to a language of weapons of massdestruction and terrorism. It was a languagethat elided state terrorism, notably thesystematic killing of civilian populations thatwas a hallmark of US warfare from 1944 to thepresent, while focusing attention on non-stateactors such as al-Qaeda. There is a secondmajor change in the international landscape ofmilitary conflict. That is the most importanttechnological change of the postwar era: theuse by (above all) the United States of dronesto map and bomb on a world scale. Each ofthese inflects above all the possibilities ofbombing independent of nuclear weapons.

In drawing attention to US bombing strategiesdeploying "conventional weapons" whilekeeping nuclear weapons in reserve since1945, the point is not to deny the criticalimportance of the latter in shaping the globalbalance of power/balance of terror. Far from it.It is, however, to suggest new perspectives onour nuclear age and the nature of warfare inthe long twentieth century and into the newmillennium.

This text is slightly modified from a chapterthat appeared in Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, ed.,Natural Disaster and Reconstruction in AsianEconomies. A Global Synthesis of Shared

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Experiences (London: Palgrave Macmillan,2013).

Recommended Citation: Mark Selden, "BombsBursting in Air: State and citizen responses tothe US firebombing and Atomic bombing ofJapan," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue3, No.4, January 20, 2014.

Mark Selden is a Senior Research Associate inthe East Asia Program at Cornell Universityand a coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Journal.His books include The Atomic Bomb: VoicesFrom Hiroshima and Nagasaki (with KyokoSelden), China, East Asia and the GlobalEconomy: Regional and historical perspectives(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415464595/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (with Takeshi Hamashita andLinda Grove), The Resurgence of East Asia:500 , 150 and 50 Year Perspec t i ves(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415316367/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (with Giovanni Arrighi andTakeshi Hamashita), and War and StateTerrorism: The United States, Japan, and theAsia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742523918/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (with Alvin So); ChineseSociety: Change, Conflict and Resistance(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742523918/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (with Elizabeth Perry). Hishomepage is www.markselden. info /(http://www.markselden.info/).

Related articles

• Bret Fisk and Cary Karacas, The Firebombingof Tokyo and Its Legacy: Introduction(http://www.japanfocus.org/-Bret-Fisk/3469)

Notes

1 I am grateful for critical responses to earlierdrafts of this paper from John Gittings, CaryKaracas and Satoko Norimatsu.

2 A small number of works have problematizedthe good war narrative by drawing attention toUS atrocities in the Asia-Pacific War, typically

centering on the torture, ki l l ing anddesecration of captured Japanese soldiers.These include Peter Schrijvers, The GI WarAgainst Japan. American Soldiers in Asia andthe Pacific During World War II (New York:NYU Press, 2002) and John Dower, WarWithout Mercy: Race and Power in the PacificWar (New York: Pantheon, 1986). Two recentworks c losely assess the bombing ofnoncombatants in both Japan and Germany,and the ravaging of nature and society as aresult of strategic bombing that has beenignored in much of the literature. A. C.Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The historyand moral legacy of the WW II bombing ofcivilians in Germany and Japan (New York:Walker & Company, 2006), provides athoroughgoing assessment of US and Britishstrategic bombing (including atomic bombing)through the lens of ethics and internationallaw. See also Michael Bess, in Choices UnderFire. Moral Dimensions of World War II (NewYork: Knopf, 2006), pp. 88-110.

3 Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 90-91.

4 Michael Sherry, "The United States andStrategic Bombing: From Prophecy toMemory," in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B.Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A twentiethcentury history (New York: The New Press,2009), pp. 175-90; Cary Karacas, "ImaginingAir Raids on Tokyo, 1930-1945," paperpresented at the Association for Asian Studiesannual meeting, Boston, March 23, 2007.Sherry traces other prophecies of nuclearbombing back to H.G. Wells 1913 novel TheWorld Set Free.

5 David Fedman and Cary Karacas. "ACartographic Fade to Black: Mapping theDestruction of Urban Japan During World WarII." Journal of Historical Geography 36, no. 3(2012), pp. 306–28.

6 Robert Rhodes, The Making of the AtomicBomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp.

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596-97; Wesley Frank Craven and James LeaGate, The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki June1944 to August 1945. Vol. 5, The Army AirForces in World War II (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1953; 1983 Office of Air ForceHistory imprint) pp. 609-13; E. Bartlett Kerr,Flames Over Tokyo (New York: Fine, 1991), pp.146-50; Barrett Tillman, Whirlwind. The AirWar Against Japan, 1942-1945, (New York:Simon & Schuster, 2010) pp. 134-73; KennethP. Werrell, Blankets of Fire. U.S. Bombers overJapan during World War II (Washington:Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996) pp.150-93.

7 Sherry, Air Power , p. 276. A detailedphotographic record, including images ofscores of the dead, some burnt to a crisp anddistorted beyond recognition, others apparentlyserene in death, and of acres of the cityflattened as if by an immense tornado, is foundin Ishikawa Koyo, Tokyo daikushu no zenkiroku(Complete Record of the Great Tokyo AirAttack) (Tokyo, 1992); Tokyo kushu o kirokusuru kai ed., Tokyo daikushu no kiroku (Recordof the Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo:Sanseido, 1982), and Dokyumento: Tokyodaikushu (Document: The Great Tokyo AirAttack) (Tokyo: Yukeisha, 1968). See thespecial issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal editedby Bret F i sk and Cary Karacas , TheFirebombing of Tokyo: Views from the Ground(https://apjjf.org/-Bret-Fisk/3469), The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 3 No 1, January 17,2011.

8 Dokyumento. Toky o daikushu, pp. 168-73.

9 The Survey's killed-to-injured ratio of betterthan two to one was far higher than mostestimates for the atomic bombing of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki where killed and wounded wereapproximately equal. If accurate, it is indicativeof the immense difficulty in escaping for thosenear the center of the Tokyo firestorm on thatwindswept night. The Survey's kill ratio has,however, been challenged by Japanese

researchers who found much higher kill ratiosat Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly whenone includes those who died of bomb injuriesmonths and years later. In my view, the SBSestimates both exaggerate the killed to injuredratio and understate the numbers killed in theTokyo raid. The Committee for the Compilationof Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomicbombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshimaand Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and SocialEffects of the Atomic Bombing (New York:Basic Books, 1991), pp. 420-21; Cf. U.S.Strategic Bombing Survey, Field ReportCovering Air Raid Protection and AlliedSubjects Tokyo (n.p. 1946), pp. 3, 79. Incontrast to the atomic bombing of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki, which for fifty years has beenthe subject of intense research by Japanese,Americans and others, the most significantrecords of the Tokyo attack are those compiledat the time by Japanese police and firedepartments. The U.S. Strategic BombingSurvey study of Effects of Air Attack on UrbanComplex Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama (n.p.1947), p. 8, observes that Japanese policeestimates make no mention of the numbers ofpeople missing. In contrast to the monitoring ofatomic bomb deaths over the subsequent sixdecades, the Tokyo casualty figures at bestrecord deaths and injuries within days of thebombing at a time when the capacity of theTokyo military and police to compile recordshad been overwhelmed. Many more who died inthe fo l lowing weeks and months gounrecorded.

10 Barrett Tillman, Whirlwind, pp. 144-45documents the startling lack of preparedness ofJapanese cities to cope with the bombing. "Onesurvey noted, 'The common portable fireextinguisher of the C2, carbon tetrachloride,foam, and water pump can types were not usedby Japanese firemen.' In one of the mosturbanized nations on earth there were fouraerial ladders: three in Tokyo and one in Kyoto.But in 1945 only one of Tokyo's trucks wasoperational . . . Their 500-gpm pumps were

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therefore largely useless."

11 Karacas, "Imagining Air Raids," p. 22;Thomas R. Havens, Valley of Darkness. TheJapanese People and World War II, (New York:WW Norton 1978), p. 163, puts the number ofurban residents evacuated to the countrysideoverall at 10 million. He estimates that 350,000students from national schools in grades threeto six were evacuated in 1944 and 100,000 firstand second graders in early 1945.

12 John W. Dower, "Sensational Rumors,Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of theThought Police," in Japan in War and Peace(New York: The New Press, 1993), p. 117.United States Strategic Bombing Survey,Summary Report, Vol I, pp. 16-20.

13 Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, p. 1.

14 Bret Fisk and Cary Karacas, The Firebombingof Tokyo and Its Legacy: Introduction(https://apjjf.org/-Bret-Fisk/3469), The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 3 No 1, January 17,2011. Fisk and Karacas draw on Overall Reportof Damage Sustained by the Nation During thePacific War, Economic Stabilization Agency,Planning Department, Office of the SecretaryGeneral, 1949, which may be viewed here(http://www.japanairraids.org/?page_id=1664).

15 The numbers killed, specifically the numbersof noncombatants killed, in the Korean,Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars weregreater, but each of those wars extended overmany years and bombing accounted for only aportion of deaths.

16 It may be tempting to consider whether theUS willingness to kill such massive numbers ofJapanese civilians can be understood in termsof racism, a suggestion sometimes applied tothe atomic bomb. Such a view is, I believe,negated by US participation in area bombingattacks at Dresden in 1944. Cf. John Dower'snuanced historical perspective on war andracism in American thought and praxis in War

Without Mercy: Race and Power in the PacificWar (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). InYear 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston:South End Press, 1993) and many other works,Noam Chomsky emphasizes the continuities inWestern ideologies that undergird practicesleading to the annihilation of entire populationsin the course of colonial and expansionist warsover half a millennium and more. MatthewJones, After Hiroshima. The United States,Race and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945-1965(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2010). Jones emphasizes factors of race, butnot racism in the Pacific War, the atomicbombing ( there is no ment ion of thefirebombing) and the Korean and VietnamWars. He considers US consideration of use ofthe atomic bomb in all of these, noting USplans to drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo whenmore bombs became available by the end ofAugust, if Japan had not yet surrendered.

17 The master work on the world history ofpeace thought and activism is John Gittings,The Glorious Art of Peace. From the Iliad toIraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),chapters 5-7.

18 Geoffrey Best, War and Law Since 1945.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) pp. 180-81.Could be interpreted . . . but at the TokyoTrials, defense attempts to raise the issue ofAmerican firebombing and the atomic bombingwere ruled out by the court. It was Japan thatwas on trial.

19 Bombing would also be extended from citiesto the countryside, as in the Agent Orangedefoliation attacks that destroyed the forestcover and poisoned residents of sprayed areasof Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. See Fred A.Wilcox, Scorched Earth. Legacies of ChemicalWarfare in Vietnam (New York: Seven StoriesPress, 2011).

20 elin o'Hara slavick, Bomb After Bomb. AViolent Cartography (Milan: Charta, 2007), p.

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35.

21 Mark Selden, "Japanese and American WarAtroc i t i es , H i s tor i ca l Memory andReconciliation: World War II to Today," JapanFocus, April 15, 2008. The Asia-Pacific Journal:Japan Focus contains scores of articles on war,atrocities, and historical memory in the PacificWar .

22 An insightful discussion of Japanese warcrimes in the Pacific, locating the issues withina comparative context of atrocities committedby the US, Germany, and other powers, is YukiTanaka's Hidden Horrors: Japanese Crimes inWorld War II. Takashi Yoshida, The Making ofthe "Rape of Nanking": History and Memory inJapan, China and the United States (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2006) examines theunderstanding of the Nanjing Massacre in eachcountry.

2 3 Mark Selden, "String of Pearls: TheArchipelago of Bases, Military Colonization,and the Making of the American Empire in thePacific," International Journal of OkinawanStudies, Vol 3 No 1, June 2012 (Special Issueon Islands) pp. 45-62.

24 Jones, After Hiroshima, pp. 24-25. PeterKuznick, "The Decision to Risk the Future:Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and theA p o c a l y p t i c N a r r a t i v e( h t t p s : / / a p j j f . o r g / - P e t e r _ J _ -Kuznick/2479)," suggests that those who heldthat dropping atomic bombs on Japan wasmoral ly repugnant and/or mi l i tar i lyunnecessary in the immediate postwar periodincluded Admiral William Leahy, GeneralDwight Eisenhower, General DouglasMacArthur, General Curtis LeMay, GeneralHenry Arnold, Brigadier General BonnerFellers, Admiral Ernest King, General CarlSpaatz, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and AdmiralWilliam "Bull" Halsey. The fact of the matter,however, is that, with the exception of a groupof atomic scientists, these criticisms were

raised only in the postwar.

25 Ian Buruma, "Expect to be Lied to in Japan,"New York Review of Books, November 8, 2012.See See also, Monica Braw, The Atomic BombSuppressed. American Censorship in OccupiedJapan (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991). See theextensive discussion of censorship in TakemaeEiji, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation ofJapan and Its Legacy (London: Continuum,2002), espec. pp. 382-404, and John W. Dower,Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of WorldWar II, espec. pp. 405-40.

26 William R. Laurence, U.S. Atom Bomb SiteBelies Tokyo Tales: Tests on New MexicoRange Confirm that Blast, and not RadiationTook Toll, New York Times, September 12,1945. Quoting Gen. Leslie Groves, director ofthe atom bomb project and the point man onradiation denial: "The Japanese claim thatpeople died from radiation. If this is true, thenumber was very small."

27 Cary Karacas, "Place, Public Memory, andthe Tokyo Air Raids." Geographical Review 100,no. 4 (October 1, 2010), pp. 521–37.

28 Some useful bibliographies on Englishlanguage sources on the literary and artisticresponses to the atomic bomb are AnnotatedBibliography for Atomic Bomb Literature fromt h e A l s o s D i g i t a l L i b r a r y(http://alsos.wlu.edu/qsearch.aspx?browse=disciplines/Literature) (2012) (literature, film,memoir, bibliographies); Tomoko Nakamura,English Books on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: AnO n - l i n e B i b l i o g r a p h y(http://homepage2.nifty.com/tomokonet/ebhn/index.html) (2004) (Literature, memoirs,photography, research reports); Amazon lists2 , 0 4 8 w o r k s u n d e r A t o m i c B o m b(http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=Atomic%20bomb&page=1&rh=n%3A17%2Ck%3AAtomic%20bomb). Kyoko and Mark Selden,eds., The Atomic Bomb: Voices From Hiroshimaand Nagasaki offers a range of literary, artistic,

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memoir and documentary works (Armonk: M.E.Sharpe, 1989). Nihon no genbaku bungaku(Japan's atomic bomb literature), Tokyo:Herupu Shuppansha, 1983) is the mostextensive Japanese language collection ofatomic literature.

29 The Tokyo firebombing also generatedimportant artist expressions, notably the elevenpaintings of "That Unforgettable Day--TheGreat Tokyo Air Raid through Drawings.", Butin contrast to the Japanese and internationalattention that Unforgettable Fire received, theTokyo firebombing paintings have receivedlittle attention. Fisk and Caracas, "TheFirebombing of Tokyo and Its Legacy:Introduction (https://apjjf.org/-Bret-Fisk/3469)."

30 A YouTube upload of the English languagedubbed version of Grave of the Fireflies(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpeHc7h7CaE).

31 Mick Broderick and Robert Jacobs bring thepoint home powerfully in their work on thefantasy of the atomic bombing of New YorkCity, born in the New York Daily News onAugust 7, 1945 and continuing in art andfantasy to the present. Nuke York, New York:Nuclear Holocaust in the American Imaginationf r o m H i r o s h i m a t o 9 / 1 1(https://apjjf.org/-Mick-Broderick/3726).

32 See particularly See Matashichi Oishi, TheDay the Sun Rose in the West. Bikini, the LuckyDragon and I (Honolulu: University of HawaiiPress, 2011).

33 Trans. by Kyoko Selden, The Atomic Bomb, p.122.

34 Trans. by Kyoko Selden, The Atomic Bomb, p.222.

35 Cary Karacas kindly drew my attention to therole of some local governments in working with

local citizens to memorialize bomb victims.36 Not everyone welcomed the World Heritagedesignation. Jung-Sun N. Han notes that theChinese government expressed reservationsabout the designation of the site: "During theSecond World War, it was the other Asiancountries and peoples who suffered thegreatest loss in life and property. But todaythere are still few

people trying to deny this fact of history. Assuch being the case, if Hiroshima

nomination is approved to be included on theWorld Heritage List, even though

on an exceptional basis, it may be utilised forharmful purpose by these few

people. This will, of course, not be conducive tothe safeguarding of world peace

and security." "Conserving the Heritage ofShame: War Remembrance and War-relatedSites in

Contemporary Japan," Journal of ContemporaryAsia, 42:3, 2012, p. 499.

37 See Reconciliation and Peace throughRemembering History: Preserving the Memoryof the Great Tokyo Air Raid 歴史の記憶」から和解と平和へ東京大空襲を語りついで( h t t p s : / / a p j j f . o r g / - S a o t o m e -Katsumoto/3472) trans. by Bret Fisk, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 3 No 4, January 17,2011.

38 Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds. LivingWith the Bomb. American and JapaneseCultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk:M.E. Sharpe, 1997), Introduction, George H.Roeder, Jr., "Making Things Visible: Learningfrom the Censors," and Yui Daizaburo," B e t w e e n P e a r l H a r b o r a n dHiroshima/Nagasaki: Nationalism and Memoryin Japan and the United States."