Living With the Bomb: The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Consciousness

Extract

Until the last six months of World War Two, the home islands of Japan were virtually untouched by the ravages of war. That changed definitively on the night of March 9 1945, as the full fury of U.S. firebombing was unleashed on Tokyo. The raid turned a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo into an inferno. Police Cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets as “rivers of fire. Everywhere one could see flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like match sticks… . Immense vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire.” 100,000 civilians died. More than one million homes were destroyed. Yet this was but a prelude of the hell that was to come.