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Reconciliation and Peace through Remembering History: Preserving the Memory of the Great Tokyo Air Raid

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Saotome Katsumoto  and
Bret Fisk
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Introduction: In this 2009 speech given by a central figure in the decades-long citizen's movement to remember and memorialize the Tokyo air raids, Saotome Katsumoto discusses details of his own experience of the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Japan's capital. He then situates the air raids on Tokyo within the context of twentieth century terror bombing campaigns and Japan's “Fifteen Year War” in Asia.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am a novelist from Japan and I am honored and pleased to have this opportunity to speak at Bradford University today. In Japan, I am the director of a privately founded and operated historical museum dedicated to preserving the memory of the damage wrought by American planes near the end of the Second World War. Accompanying me today are members of our museum staff.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , January 2011 , e4
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

References

Notes

1 Editor's note: While one can take issue with the assertion that the loss of lives from the Tokyo raid are numerically comparable to the atomic bombings (especially in the case of Hiroshima when including deaths from radiation), the author's point about the lack of knowledge regarding the catastrophic results of the firebombing of Tokyo is nonetheless valid.

2 Editor's note: The Hague Rules of Air Warfare were never officially adopted. Also, the Japanese navy's destructive aerial attacks on Shanghai in 1932, considered “the first significant aerial operations in East Asia,” predate Guernica by five years. Mark Peattie, Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941, Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001, p. 51.

3 Editor's note: As Mark Selden explains, the United States refrained from area bombing until its February 1945 attack on Dresden, Germany. “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).