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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
In 2007, an extraordinary apology by Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō appeared in print. It begins with an acknowledgement that Japan's indiscriminate bombing of civilians living in the Nationalist Chinese wartime capital of Chongqing beginning in 1938 violated international law and gave the United States a justification for its own devastating incendiary raids on Japan's capital. The prime minister also admits that, by not capitulating to the United States once defeat became inevitable, the Japanese government essentially permitted the firebombing of Tokyo and thereafter the rest of urban Japan in 1945. To show the sincerity of its apologetic stance toward Tokyo air raid victims, the state agreed to provide financial compensation to survivors and bereaved family members, conduct a comprehensive survey of the dead, and build a memorial both to honor them and to serve as a reminder that the air raids had occurred. The letter exists only as a suggested template, however, written by plaintiffs who sued the Japanese government seeking such an apology and compensation of 1.23 billion yen (approximately $15 million). In March 2007, sixty-two years after the catastrophic Great Tokyo Air Raid forever changed their lives, 112 survivors and bereaved family members announced their intent to sue the government for redress. The following month, the plaintiffs, the oldest of whom was eighty-six and whose average age was seventy-four, filed the suit with the Tokyo District Court.
1 Tōkyō Daikūshū Soshō Genkokudan, Tōkyō Daikūshū Sojō - Shazai Oyobi Songai Baishō Seikyū Jiken (Great Tokyo Air Raid Petition - A Case for an Apology and Damage Compensation), 2007, 113. At least two other air raid-related compensation cases appeared before this one. On legal technicalities, in 1980 the Tokyo District Court rejected a compensation lawsuit brought by an individual who experienced the March 10 1945 raid, as did the Supreme Court in 1987 with a suit filed by Nagoya air raid victims.
2 In March 2008, twenty additional plaintiffs, some affected by air raids on Tokyo other than the March 10 firebombing, joined the lawsuit.
3 “Sensō Higaisha to Mitomete,” Asahi shimbun, 10 March 2007.
4 Mark Selden, “A forgotten holocaust: U.S. bombing strategy, the destruction of Japanese cities, and the American way of war from the Pacific War to Iraq,” in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009, pp. 77-96). Tokyo air raid activists use the figure of 100,000 deaths in the March 10 raid, but believe that the actual death toll is higher. For a discussion of the difficulties of counting the dead, see Gordon Daniels, “The Great Tokyo Air Raid, 9-10 March 1945” in W.G. Beasley, ed., Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature and Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, pp.113-131; Selden 2009; and Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 406, note 76.
5 For discussions of some of these compensation lawsuits, see, in addition to the many articles on forced labor by William Underwood in this journal: Robert Efird, 2008, “Japan's ‘War Orphans’: Identification and State Responsibility,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 34.2 (2008), pp. 363-388; William Gao, “Overdue Redress: Surveying and Explaining the Shifting Japanese Jurisprudence on Victims' Compensation Claims,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 45 (2007), pp. 529-550; Petra Schmidt, “Japan's Wartime Compensation: Forced Labour,” Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law 2 (2000), pp. 1-54; and Hae Bong Shin, “Compensation for Victims of Wartime Atrocities: Recent Developments in Japan's Case Law,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 3 (2005), pp. 187-206.
6 The term was coined by historian Carol Gluck in “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World” in Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter, eds., Ruptured Histories: War and Memory in Post-Cold War Asia, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, p.57.
7 Interview with Hoshino Hiroshi, 19 August 2009. For discussion of these terms, see Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Toward and Urban Geopolitics (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); and Kenneth Hewitt, “Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73.2 (1983), pp. 257-284.
8 Hoshino Hiroshi, “Tōkyō Kūshū, Kiroku Undō no Genzai,” (The Present Status of the Movement to Remember the Tokyo Air Raids), Rekishi Hyōron, 616 (2001), pp. 63-68; Semete Namae Dake Demo newsletter No. 13; 15 Jan 2006.
9 While city or local governments at other sites of catastrophic loss in Japan (most notably Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa, and Osaka) endeavored to compose such reports, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government did not until 2000.
10 Going through the reports brings to mind the spate of congratulatory messages cabled to Curtis LeMay, head of the XXIst Bomber Command, following the firebombing that killed the mother Haru, her children, and tens of thousands of others like them: “I am exceptionally pleased,” wrote, Army Air Forces chief of staff H.H. Arnold, closing with: “Good luck and good bombing.” Arnold's top assistant, Lauris Norstad, expressed “the greatest admiration for the work you are doing,” and the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's 58th Task Force wrote “may your targets always flame.” XXIst Bomber Command, Mission Report March 10, 1945, National Archives Record Group 18, Box 5446.
11 While we will never have an accurate figure of how many people died in the March 10, 1945 Great Tokyo Air Raid or for that matter in all of the air raids on Tokyo combined, a useful reference point when considering the 76,700 names of air raid victims that the city collected is the number of unidentified and unclaimed remains - 105,400 - that the Tokyo Metropolitan Memorial Association (Tōkyō-to Irei Kyōkai) states are contained in a metropolitan charnel house. Hoshino 2001; Semete Namae Dake Demo newsletter Number 13, 15 January 2006.
12 One striking aspect of this monument as a receptacle for the names of the dead is that is closed to the public, and that even if an individual were allowed to enter the monument, the names of the dead, in closed books held behind a wall of glass, would not be visible. This is completely different, for instance, from how the names of the Osaka air raid victims are engraved in copper on a memorial, located outside the Peace Osaka museum, for all visitors to read and touch. The same holds true for Okinawa's Cornerstone of Peace. For an analysis of the Tokyo air raid monument and the related movement to build a metropolitan peace museum, see Cary Karacas, “Place, Public Memory, and the Tokyo Air Raids,” Geographical Review, 100:4 (2010) pp. 521-537, found here.
13 Semete Namae Dake Demo newsletter Number 4, 15 August 2002; Number 6, 24 May 2003; Tōkyō-to Irei Kyōkai, Sensai Ōshisha Kaisō Jigyō Shimatsuki (A Complete Record of Steps Taken during the Reburial of the War Dead) (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Memorial Association, 1985).
14 Semete Namae Dake Demo newsletter Number 10, 15 February 2005, and Number 15, 10 September 2006.
15 The smell of burning flesh sickened even American B-29 crews flying 7,000 feet above the flames. See Chester Marshall, iSky Giants Over Japan: A Diary of a B-29 Combat Crew in WWII (Winona: Apollo Books, 1984), p. 147.
16 Tōkyō Daikūshū Sojō - Shazai oyobi songai baishō seikyū jiken.
17 For an extended analysis of the Tokyo air raid lawsuit and a related 1987 Nagoya air raid lawsuit, see Naitō Mitsuhiro, “Kūshū Higai to Kenpōteki Hoshō: Tōkyō Daikūshū Soshō ni Okeru Hisaisha Kyūsai no Kenpōron” (Air raid damages and legal compensation: A theory of constitutional compensation for victims in relation to the Great Tokyo Air Raid lawsuit), i, num. 106 (2009), pp. 1-51, found here.
18 Hewitt 1983, p.271.
19 With the court system usually assisting, the state has defended itself from most compensation lawsuits by foreign nationals with a handful of effective maneuvers: dismissing cases on technical grounds, the expiration of statute of limitations, the conclusion of state bilateral agreements, and an “irresponsibility of the state” doctrine that resists retroactively applying laws that obligate the state to compensate for losses incurred during the wartime period.
20 For detailed examinations of the applications of the endurance doctrine, see Robert Efird, “Japan's ‘war orphans’: identification and state responsibility,” The Journal of Japanese Studies, 34. 2(2008), pp.363-388; and Akiko Naono, “Producing Sacrificial Subjects for the Nation,” in Herman Gray and Macarena Gomez-Barris, eds., Toward a Sociology of the Trace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, pp. 109-34.
21 Naono 2010.
22 Text of the 1942 Senji saigai hogo-hō.
23 Petra Schmidt, “Disabled Colonial Veterans of the Imperial Japanese Forces and the Right to Receive Social Benefits from Japan,” Sydney Law Review, 21 (1999), pp. 231-59, note 40; Ikeya Kōji, Robō no Kūshū Hisaisha: Sengo Hoshō no Kūhaku (Abandoned Air Raid Victims and the Absence of Postwar Compensation) (Tokyo: Kurieitibu Nijūichi, 2010). For a discussion veteran compensation laws, see Schmidt 1999.
24 Discussed in the Tokyo air raid lawsuit's fifth oral proceeding, 24 April 2008.
25 Ikeya 2010.
26 Tokyo air raid lawsuit's fourth oral proceeding, 21 January 2008.
27 These included the Economic Stabilization Agency's 1949 Taiheiyō Sensō ni Yoru Wagakuni no Higai Sōgō Hōkokusho, (Overall Report of Damage Sustained by the Nation During the Pacific War, which can be viewed here); the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's 1953 Tōkyōto Sensai Shi, (A Record of War Damages in Tokyo); and the 1979 Zenkoku Sensai Shijitsu Chōsa Hōkokusho, (Survey Report of War Damages in Japan) released by the Japan Association for the Bereaved Families of War Dead (Nihon Sensai Izokukai) under the auspices of the Cabinet Secretariat.
28 Tokyo District Court 14 December 2009 ruling.
29 For example, see Maeda Tetsuo, Senryaku Bakugeki no Shisō: Gerunika, Jūkei, Hiroshima (Strategic Bombing Philosophy: Guernica, Chongquing, Hiroshima) (Tokyo: Gaifusha, 2006); and Sensō to Kūshū Mondai Kenkyūkai, eds., Jūkei Bakugeki to wa Nani Datta no ka. (What was the bombing of Chongqing about?) (Tokyo: Kōbunken, 2009).
30 William Underwood, “Redress Crossroads in Japan: Decisive Phase in Campaigns to Compensate Korean and Chinese Wartime Forced Laborers,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 30 No 1, July 26, 2010.
31 “Kūshū Hisaisha, Zenkoku Soshiki Kessei e -Kyūsai-hō no Seitei Motome,” Asahi shimbun, 13 July 2010; “Taisenchū no Kūshū Higaisha, Hatsu no Zenkoku Soshiki - Kyūsai-hō no Anbun Sakusei e,” Asahi shimbun, 15 August 2010.
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