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Chapter One

Tokyo Burns:

Raid of March 9-10

"A silver curtain falling"

With the night came north winds, blowing bitter and cold across the uneasy city. By 8:00 P.M., great shuddering gusts, at 45 to 67 miles per hour, "violent as a spring typhoon," shoved against the wooden walls and pried at the doors and windows of the dwellings of Tokyo's 4.3 million citizens. Elsewhere, the winds toppled or jammed radar antennas and made mischief with communications. On the pitching seas to the south, picketboats raised frantic alerts of many approaching bombers, but faulty radio reception--and faulty organization--muffled the alarms.

    On radios throughout the capital, the voice of Hidetoshi Matsumura, the spokesman for Imperial General Headquarters, hailed the coming day, March 10, as Army Day. His oration ended in the weary cliché: "The darkest hour is just before dawn." His words had barely faded when, at 10:30 P.M., sirens sounded the long, steady wail warning of distant but potentially threatening aircraft. In contrast to the pervasive disorder that had invaded and overwhelmed all aspects of daily life in the capital, the air-raid alert system that roused many from mid-slumber was still respected for its efficiency. With electric lights forbidden after nightfall and cooking gas nonexistent, most families now habitually prepared and ate meals at twilight and then retired early. But even in repose, Tokyo's denizens remained partly dressed, usually in shapeless, loose monpe trousers.

    Near midnight, coast watchers reported droning noises that were likely from B-29s. The listeners could speak with authority, for the dreaded Superfortresses--known to the Tokyoites as "bikko," "B-san," "Lord B.," "okyakusama" (visitors), and "regular mail"--had come many times to the capital, though only once at night, and never in such numbers or so low. Surprised and confused, civil-defense authorities hesitated, and the sirens did not exclaim the sharp, broken notes of the air-raid alarm, signifying an imminent attack, until 12:15 A.M. By then, bombs had been falling for seven minutes, and rusty red-yellow roses of flame already flowered across eastern Tokyo.

    A Danish diplomat, Lars Tillitse, dutifully ventured outside to make sure that his property betrayed no light. A "terrific noise" assailed him as the four-motored bombers thundered by overhead. Another Western observer, Robert Guillain, was more exact: A B-29 passed with "an odd, rhythmic buzzing that filled the night with deep, powerful pulsation and made my whole house vibrate." Tillitse observed his neighbors erupting from their homes, animating the dark narrow streets, the men in helmets, everyone else in padded air-raid hoods. "Radios were going full blast and doors and windows were open, so that people in the street could keep informed," recalled Tillitse. "Already we could see fires."

    Radios proclaimed the approach of another wave of bombers, and Tillitse stayed outside to watch. Energetic searchlight crews fanned the slender, probing white columns of their beams from horizon to zenith. As the diplomat gazed upward, six or seven times a bomber punctured a column of illumination, whereupon five or six other lights converged to hold it. Centered in an aura, the silvery body became the target for gunners, who sent shells skyward. But in each case, the shiny cross glided on unhurt. Then Tillitse heard the crowd cheer and swiveled his head to behold one B-29 alight. The whole body glowed red, but the plane continued its flight until, like lightning, white flames burst from the sides. Enveloped in fire, the Superfortress plummeted to the ground.

    Everywhere across Tokyo, the night teemed with citizens scurrying from their houses clutching sleeping mats and carefully culled possessions--pots and pans and, above all, treasured hoards of rice and soya paste--seeking refuge. The entire city had only eighteen satisfactory concrete shelters, with a total capacity of five thousand, little more than one space for every thousand persons. The next-best shelters comprised the basements of the relatively few Western-style buildings, constructed to resist earthquakes, and some equally sparse cave shelters. But the mass of citizens lacked any adequate haven. Some families gathered in clothes cupboards within their homes, as the government recommended. Most citizens, however, headed for their bokugo , little holes that had been bored beside their houses or in the little ribbon of earth between street and sidewalk. These were typically crude, two to five meters long, one meter across, and one and one-half to two meters deep, covered with a roof made with a few poles, bamboo rafters, and a thin crust of earth. The citizens provided these rudimentary protections themselves, chanting "oh, one, two, oh, one, two" as they dug, around which many then planted flowers, and into which many a man or woman tripped, breaking bones.

    The absence of any comprehensive public shelter system partially reflected the fact that Tokyo rested upon unstable soil that precluded extensive excavation; more conspicuously, it betrayed the utter inadequacy of both resources and foresight. The issue had first been raised after World War I, when images of bombers raining explosives, poison gas, or both on cities had found expression. Contemplation of these lurid prospects led Tokyo's undertakers to make discreet inquiries to military authorities as to the number of fatalities that could be expected in one year. The answer they got was thirty thousand. The first recorded air-raid drill in Japan occurred in June 1928. By 1932, an air-raid exercise, actually no more than a practice blackout, had become an annual Tokyo ritual. Air-defense preparations were initially vested in local governments, but in 1937 the National Civilian Air Defense Law transferred responsibilities to national and prefectural (state) authorities. This new ukase, however, ignited bureaucratic warfare and spawned rival and conflicting rules and concepts, frittering away time and effort.

    It was the bedrock conviction that Tokyo would not be bombed, however, that hobbled all efforts, and the nearly unbroken string of triumphs in China and in the first months of the war with the United States served to make such a threat seem unthinkable. On the evening of April 17, 1942, the German-born wife of Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo informed the spouse of a neutral diplomat at a dinner that she need not "worry about sending her furs and jewels and wines out of Tokyo or go to the expense of building an air-raid shelter, since the Americans could never bomb Tokyo." The next day, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle hit targets in Japan, including Tokyo, with sixteen B-25s. The raid generated shock, but, perversely, its small amount of damage and few casualties enhanced complacency.

    There was also the question of public morale and the prestige of the government and the military. Official preoccupation with air raids and drills would transmit the message that such events might come to pass. This in turn would mean that Japan's leaders believed their warriors would be unable to keep the enemy at bay. It was only with the fall of Saipan in July 1944, observed Danish diplomat Tillitse, that "Japanese with insight knew that Japan had to prepare for the worst." But the government decided that extensive preparations would likely disrupt the war effort just as the struggle had reached a critical phase, and elected to give priority to production over civilian protection.

    Before 1944, serious evacuation preparations had been sporadic and erratic. The cabinet decided on October 15, 1943, to remove persons not involved in war production from urban areas, but as the home minister confessed to the Diet in March 1944, "I haven't come across much public sentiment for picking up and leaving." By July 1944, movie theaters featured a short entitled Evacuation , which aimed to instill compliance in citizens with images of blazing neighborhoods; it, too, met with scant success.

    At the end of June 1944, the cabinet published an "Outline for Encouraging the Evacuation of Schoolchildren." The government earmarked 350,000 third- through sixth-graders in a dozen major cities for evacuation to rural areas. They joined the almost 300,000 schoolchildren parents had voluntarily shipped from the cities. Another 100,000 first- and second-graders followed in March 1945. The separations, almost as traumatic as the air raids themselves, spread an epidemic of homesickness as illustrated in one child's letter: "Mother, please listen to Mitsuko's one great request. Mother, as soon as this letter arrives, please come to see me that very day.... Mother, every day Mitsuko goes on crying."

    Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso summoned the Japanese people on January 1, 1945, to "strengthen the national structure to prosecute the war" by perfecting air-raid defenses and warned, "With the progress of the war, difficulties in people's daily life will increase, and there is also the danger of air raids becoming more intensive." These exhortations and formal programs, upon the heels of early B-29 raids, ultimately caused over 1.7 million citizens to leave Tokyo by March 1945. This number included thousands who lost their homes in the massive effort to lay a grid of firebreaks over the city's contours in order to constrict damage to the closely packed wooden houses in the poorer districts. American photographic reconnaissance identified 31 miles of these firebreaks, ranging from 45 to 110 yards wide. Japanese sources report the destruction of 207,370 homes to clear these gaps, as well as to create open spaces around vital buildings and installations. But these numbers belie the fact that fundamentally both resources and resolve were lacking; in far too many cases, even when structures had been demolished, the boards were left where they fell, providing even more ideal kindling.

    But on the night of March 9-10, the forfeit for lost time and opportunity was paid by Tokyo's remaining civilian population. From an overlook at the Jesuit Sophia University, Father Gustav Bruno Maria Bitter gazed out to see the first "circle of fire," which reminded him of "a silver curtain falling, like the lametta , the silver tinsel that we hung from Christmas trees in Germany.... And where these silver streamers would touch the earth, red fires would spring up." To Lars Tillitse, the incendiaries "did not fall; they descended rather slowly, like a cascade of silvery water. One single bomb covered quite a big area, and what they covered they devoured."

    Bitter and Tillitse surveyed the attack from western and northern Tokyo, the hilly yamanote where the middle and upper classes made their communities. But the American targets were the packed wards of the lower, flat plain called the shitamachi , especially Honjo, Fukagawa, Joto, Edogawa, and Mukojima. "It was called the `plain side' as distinguished from the `mountain side,'" as it was once described, "the hills to the west and south dotted with residential districts." The plain contained a vast overgrown tangle of wooden homes ("massed like piles of dry wood at a building site") and factories, finely veined with winding alleys, rather than streets, and stagnant canals. Apart from a few avenues and electric train lines, the only substantial feature was the Sumida River. On its left bank rested the Fukagawa docks facing Tokyo Bay, as well as the Honjo and Mukojima factory districts; along its right bank stretched Asakusa, Shitaya, and the outskirts of Kanda and Nihombashi. These communities, among the most densely populated in the world, had suffered heavily in the great 1923 earthquake. Lots in Tokyo typically measured twenty-five feet across at the street front but often were packed up to three houses deep. About 98 percent of the buildings were of wood and paper construction.

    "Inflammability was probably the chief qualification these quarters had as targets for fire bombing," noted a leading scholar of the raid, Gordon Daniels, "but one cannot deny that these areas played at least some role in Japanese war production." The demarcation between residential and industrial was "often non-existent." The intermixture of modest and medium-sized enterprises with private dwellings played an important role in armament production. The output of a major factory, and there were a great many in Tokyo, depended typically upon a flow of component parts from feeder firms across the city. Each factory was like a tree radiating a web of roots throughout the surrounding living areas from which it drew both workers and parts. "The destruction of any thickly peopled shitamachi area," observed Daniels, "would destroy some of the tap-roots of military output, besides leading to the permanent or temporary absenteeism of workers living in the locality."

    As 8,519 clusters of incendiary bombs burst apart, they released over 496,000 individual 6.2-pound cylinders, each with a strip of cloth--the "silver streamers" Father Bitter described--flapping from the rear. When a cylinder struck anything solid, it spewed a column of "flaming dew" that skittered across rooftops, setting its immediate environment afire. The wind fanned the flames to adjacent structures. Initially, it often seemed a home was unaffected, until the windows began to shine from within and then glowed "like a paper lantern" from a ball of fire that sprouted tentacles that danced out from beneath the eaves to envelop the house until it crumbled inward upon itself.

    Only six cities in Japan boasted regular, professional fire-fighting services. All the rest used volunteers. The Tokyo Fire Department, descended from a feudal organization of knights, reached a peak strength of 8,100 in November 1944 (2,500 of these were junior firemen between the ages of seventeen and twenty). Its 287 stations were by far the best accoutred in Japan, with 1,117 pieces of equipment, including much apparatus drafted from nearby rural regions. But their inventory included just three aerial extension ladders (only one of which worked), because a web of wires and obstructions littered the air above Tokyo's neighborhoods.

    The conflagration this night, with potent incendiaries falling "like rain drops," was more than any city fire department in the world could have handled. There were far too many fires--each Superfortress bomb load covered an area 1,500 to 2,000 feet long and 300 feet wide--and the heat and fleeing crowds made it impossible to get to some places. Once the fires gained hold, the scorching winds projected "great clots of flame" on short trajectories but also launched live sparks on vaulting arcs up into the sky. Then, as they gathered strength, the fires propelled upward burning bits of wood or paper that tumbled across neighborhoods and then whole wards in fiery showers. Distant observers could see "torch clusters" explode and then sink back in "wavy lines across the city," with individual blasts that looked like "flaming hair."

    After only an hour, the fire department conceded total defeat. During the night, the flames consumed 96 fire engines and 128 firemen died or were missing, as were some 500 civil guards who had assisted them. At one station, a fire left only a tangle of corpses around a melted fire engine.

    It fell to Tokyo's citizens to face a conflagration with spiritual, not material, resources. Officially, 2.75 million people had been organized formally into the air-raid defense network. Over 140,000 neighborhood associations of ten to twenty families each formed the basic units. They had taken the "air defense oath of certain victory," rendering pledges with their neighbors that they would "follow orders," "refrain from selfish conduct," and "cooperate with one another in air defense." This energetic and courageous communal effort, the government had promised, would protect and save them. "No matter what sort of air raid comes, this neighborhood association will be safe," was a typical attitude. "Fight, don't run" was the policy. And thus the onslaught was faced primarily by citizens armed with wet mats, sandbags, and buckets. The "stand your ground" policy enormously swelled the death toll in circumstances for which communal effort offered no antidote.

    American reports show that the B-29s released 1,665 tons of incendiaries into a designated target area measuring ten square miles. This patch of Tokyo included the Asakusa ward, which featured an extremely high roof density of 65 percent--the most built-up factory area did not exceed 40 percent. Moreover, while the overall population density in the targeted districts nudged 103,000 per square mile, in Asakusa it reached 135,000. Official Japanese reports said the first incendiaries fell in Kiba, along the Tokyo waterfront, and stoked large fires, spread by the wind. Two minutes later, fires unfurled in two more spots, and within fourteen minutes "the hellfire began."

    The individual fires became blazes that the great winds roused up in towering whirlwinds of jagged flames of yellow, red, and white. The center of the conflagration acted like a bellows, inhaling swift currents of superheated air and spouting up a giant rising column of incandescent gases that spewed out a whistling blizzard of sparks and firebrands, "like a huge borealis," until it became a firestorm that turned the night into a "black and pink day." Robert Guillain reported: "We could hear a crackling like the sound of bonfires--the noise, it seemed, of houses collapsing." "Now and then," recalled Lars Tillitse, "I heard the thud of falling roofs and walls."

    The planes came, shining golden against the dark roof of heaven or glittering blue, like meteors, in the searchlight beams tracing the vault of night sky from horizon to horizon. Robert Guillain described them: "Their long glinting wings, sharp as blades, could be seen through the opaque columns of smoke rising from the city, suddenly reflecting the fire from the furnace below." Father Bitter watched the "red and yellow flames reflecting from below on the silvery undersides so that they were like giant dragon flies with jeweled wings against the upper darkness."

    Driven by the winds, the fire marched northwest with extreme rapidity. It took only an hour for a huge swath of eastern Tokyo to be consumed. Those who stood their ground, defending their homes, perished quickly--in the clothes cupboard, in the bokugo , or in the rubble--often whole families at once. The key to survival was to grasp quickly that the situation was hopeless and flee. One survivor fixed the interval between when she first realized incendiary bombs were starting fires and the moment when she fled to be about ten minutes. A great many citizens--no one knows the proportions--ultimately took flight before the flames, through smoke that hung so thickly in places that they could not see more than ten feet, all "panting `huh, huh, huh' as they ran."

    The paths open to them were few and constricted: the handful of relatively broad streets, the firebreaks themselves, or the electric train lines. Salvation appeared to beckon from large solid structures, such as schools or theaters, open spaces, or bodies of water. Based upon the experience of the fires that accompanied the 1923 earthquake, rebuilding plans had incorporated three large and thirty smaller parks. "But the flames followed them," said a Japanese author, "raging in those sixty-, seventy-, and eighty-mile-per-hour winds, and swept over whole wide spaces, carrying the fiery death."

    As the fires bore down on her home, Funato Kazuyo fled with her family to a nearby school yard, where she knew there were trenches. A bright red glow from Fukagawa to the west heralded the approaching fire. Then incendiaries began to fall near the school:

People panicked, Running screaming, "We're all going to die! The Fire is coming!" The sound of incendiary bombs falling, "Whizzz," the deafening reverberations of the planes, and the great roar of the fire and wind overwhelmed us. "If we stay here we'll die! Let's run!" ... "Women and children follow us, Why are you hesitating?"

They began to run but had to backtrack. "Even two or three minutes was a terrible loss of time," she recalled. "Sparks flew everywhere. Electric wires sparked and toppled." Her sister Hiroko's turban caught fire. It had been cinched tight to keep it from being blown off in the wind, and now it would not come loose. Her sister tried to pull it off and burned her hands; the fire then burned her hair. Finally, they managed to tear it off and smother it with their legs.

    Masuko Harino was in a hostel in Nihombashi ward. When incendiaries commenced tumbling all around the hostel, the manager, reacting as his government instructed him, declared, "We will fight the fires to the last." He did; he died. Harino chose flight. She sprinted toward the electric machinery factory where she worked:

People's clothes were on fire.... Some people were writhing about in torment and no one had time to help them.... Intense heat was coming from the fire storm. My eyes seemed about to pop out. Yoshikawa-san cut her way through the mob and I followed along the road, seeking some respite from the flowing heat of the terrible fire. We ran. We saw fleeing shapes, but little else. A telephone pole collapsed and twisted electric wires snaked out along the ground. The road on both sides was full of people's possessions, burning up.

    My eyes hurt. Breathing was difficult and I felt that life was escaping me. I found a broken hydrant and soaked my zukin [air-raid turban] and put it on my head, almost unconsciously. Finally, I fled as far as Kiyosu bridge.

    Nineteen-year-old Kimie Ono looked out to see fires igniting all around his home, lighting the neighborhood up like noon. He chose an electric train line as his route of escape. Many other people chose the same path. They began laden with packs, sleeping mats, babies, clothing, and household goods in their arms or on makeshift carts, and they shouted, shoved, and jostled one another. But the flames, mounted on the winds, galloped in easy strides, outpaced the churning feet and spinning wheels, and soon framed the route. The people desperately discarded possessions to flee the faster, and the road became paved with clothes and goods. "No one stopped to loot; to stop was to die." The heated wind felled victim after victim, who staggered and then collapsed to the ground. Intermixed with the howls of wind were voices shouting, yelling, and weeping as the mass of humanity trampled over the fallen. Just ahead of him, Ono saw a mother and child running. "Suddenly the fire storm swept out a finger to lick them, and in a second, before his eyes, the mother and child burst into flames.... Their clothes afire, they staggered and fell to the ground. No one stopped to help them."

    Even in flight, however, some neighbors tried to maintain a communal effort. One typical neighborhood association fled in groups of ten to twenty, holding on to long ropes so as not to become separated. But as the running, bobbing knots of humanity threaded the narrow alleys and streets, again and again they found their path blocked by a "barricade of fire." After trying to gauge the wind, they recoiled and darted off in another direction, often only to find it, too, was now blocked by the fires spread by the shifting winds or newly fallen bombs.

    One boy running down a street, gripping his younger brother's hand, reached an intersection where crowds collided from four directions. There was a moment of milling confusion until one group broke away in one direction and the rest followed. Too often, however, individuals, families, or groups eventually came to realize they were trapped in a labyrinth walled off by flames. Then they would succumb to the spirit of shikada ga nai ("It is hopeless to try to do more") and kneel in the streets, facing toward the palace of the Emperor, and die there as the fire swept over them.

    One of the few to survive the passage of the fire was Masatake Obata. He owned precisely the type of enterprise targeted by the Americans: a small manufacturing concern networking together household workshops that supplied component parts for aircraft. On this night, there were eight persons in his household: Obata, his wife, his four children, and his two sisters, who had come to share the sweet-potato bounty they had reaped, like so many other city dwellers at this time, from bargains with farmers. About midnight, Obata, an air-raid warden, immediately recognized the danger and hustled his family and sisters into their clothes and directed them to Fuji Park. The neighborhood association forged a quick consensus that everyone should go to Sumida Park, a large open space deemed safe. Obata dispatched his own household there but stayed behind to assure that all his neighbors followed.

    When Obata finally satisfied himself that he had fulfilled his responsibilities, he turned to join his family. He was slapping at his air-raid hood to put out a fire when, not ten feet away, a cluster of incendiary bombs struck the ground and exploded. One bomb caught him in the face, knocking him unconscious. How long he lay, he never knew, but when he woke up, his shoes had been burned off, as had his toes, his arms were nearly black, and his clothes still burned. He put the fires out by rolling on the ground. He got up and staggered to a trench harboring seven badly burned people. Obata soon had them yelling at each other to stay awake and alive and chanting Buddhist prayers together.

    In Asakusa, a crowd sought succor around an old and lovely Buddhist temple, dedicated to Kannon, goddess of mercy, which drew up to sixty thousand visitors per day. It was deemed absolutely safe since the seventeenth-century building had survived all the fires and the great 1923 earthquake. This time, firebrands ignited the vast wooden structure. "The great ginkgo trees in the park went up in flames, along with the gardens--and the people."

    Some of the worst killing grounds were the schools. Hidezo Tsuchikura hustled his two children to the Futaba school, famous for its large swimming pool. They were among the first to arrive, but swarms of neighbors followed and gradually Tsuchikura moved his family from the basement air-raid shelter first to the gym and ultimately to the roof. It was "like hell," as the leaping flames surrounded the school compound and pelted sparks and flaming wood over the exposed area. Still, the heat on the roof was more bearable than the impending sultry suffocation Tsuchikura had sensed inside the building. His daughter shrieked as her clothes caught fire. Tsuchikura found a water tank and used it to put out the flames. Then his son's and his own clothes ignited. For the next ninety minutes, first one then another of them doused fires in the tank of water, though as soon as they came out their clothes began steaming under the intense heat. When the fires finally receded after consuming the entire surrounding neighborhood, Tsuchikura discovered that only his little family and twelve other people who had also sought refuge on the roof survived at the school. According to him:

The entire building had become a huge oven three stories high. Every human being inside the school was literally baked or boiled alive in heat. Dead bodies were everywhere in grisly heaps. None of them appeared to be badly charred. They looked like mannequins, some of them with a pinkish complexion ....

    But the swimming pool was the most horrible sight of all. It was hideous. More than a thousand people, we estimated, had jammed into the pool. The pool had been filled to its brim when we first arrived. Now there wasn't a drop of water, only the bodies of the adults and children who had died.

    Many thousands sought salvation in other bodies of water, such as the stagnant canals and rivers that had once given the city so much of its commercial vitality. A witness to these efforts was Kinosuke Wakabayashi, a senior official in the Sumida district. Heeding suggestions from superiors, he had dispatched all of his family, save one teenage daughter, to the countryside. When the bombers struck, he first made sure his neighbors evacuated. Then it was time to save himself and his daughter. They made for the Asashi Brewery warehouse along the Sumida River. There they sheltered in the lee of the concrete walls, mute spectators to the horror about them. They saw the figures of people running to the river, leaping through walls of flame and then diving into the water or onto the riverbanks. Soon the banks on both sides were clogged. But here as so many places elsewhere, people leaped in layer upon layer, crushing the early arrivals, and then the tidal wave of flames closed in so that to hold one's head above water was to risk being choked by smoke or seared by flame. The fire sucked the oxygen away, leaving thousands dead, "like so many fish left gasping on the bottom of a lake that has been drained."

    In their extremity, people took any shelter they could find. Miwa Koshiba, a housewife, fled with her young children and husband from a hole in their garden to the Sumida River, a half mile away. They found the river almost completely ablaze. With people dropping all around, she guided her family to a large sewer pipe that drained into the river. She remained all night in the sewer pipe, bathing the children in the waste to ward off the heat, until they were caked with filth.

    By the time the all clear sounded at 2:37 A.M., March 10, the raid had lasted approximately two hours and forty minutes. Across nearly sixteen square miles of Tokyo there was a "burned empty prairie," filled with "a sort of underbrush of roasted sheet-metal and reddish-blackish iron and heavy shards of gray tile." But it was empty only in the sense that virtually no human structure remained upright and recognizable. The vista greeting a reporter "was nothing but heaps of ashes, bits of corrugated iron, bricks, concrete blocks, a few twisted girders, and here and there the shell of a burned-out concrete building. Skeletons of motor vehicles, including fire engines, dotted the landscape."

    "The people who came back were like ghosts, uttering no words. They simply staggered back," said Funato Kazuyo, who led her badly burned sister back to their home. Her sister succumbed several days later to typhus. By dawn, Masuko Harino, who had fled from the hostel, rose from the roadside where she had lain and found some water to wash her face and restore her vision. The faces of everyone she saw were black from the grime baked on by the heat. Many survivors later manifested a darkening of the skin that lasted "days, weeks, months, and sometimes forever because of the intensity of the heat." Harino made her way gingerly barefoot over broken glass, nails, and jagged spikes of wood that lay thick upon the ground, taking particular care to avoid fallen power lines. All around, she gazed at swollen, contorted, blackened bodies that resembled "enormous ginseng roots." Whether they had been men or women she could not tell. When she reached the hostel, she waited until the other survivors gathered: There were only two others.

    Everywhere, the survivors stirred to be assaulted by yet more horrors. People staggered or lay writhing in pain, with skin charred or hanging in strips, issuing screams that received no succor. Masatake Obata faced the dawn with his seven companions in their makeshift shelter. He finally left them, seeking help for his serious burns, but at the hospital a doctor said of him, "It's not necessary to take him to any ward. Take him downstairs to the morgue in the basement. Let him join the other dead. There is no hope." He was taken to a straw mat and left to die without food or water. Three days later, his mother found him, still alive. His wife, four children, and two sisters had all perished trying to reach Sumida Park.

    The horizon of almost all of these survivors extended no further than his or her particular refuge and the path back home. Captain Shigenori Kubota, however, obtained a far more comprehensive vista of the devastation. His regular assignment was that of a teacher at the Imperial Japanese Army Medical School, but his alternate assignment was as commander of the school's Number One Rescue Unit. Kubota's detachment ostensibly incorporated nine subunits for the general public and five for the Imperial Palace. But this night, Kubota mustered only twenty-four men in a half-dozen vehicles when he set off at 3:50 A.M. His orders directed him to the Honjo district to treat the injured, who numbered perhaps one hundred thousand spread over a twenty-five-square-mile area. He was told to cooperate with private doctors, but he knew that virtually all of them were in the armed services. (Later accounting showed that of 250 "medical services" operated by the government or the Red Cross, over 100 had been destroyed.)

    Kubota's convoy penetrated the devastated areas, where a low roof of smoke hung over still-smoldering fires and bright embers that marked where thousands of homes had once been. He passed the Miya mansion of Kaya, a "once-resplendent building, with its tall columns and ornate wood work, [which] now looked like a charcoal drawing, blackened pillars with smoking ruins collapsed around them, standing lonely in a sea of burning rubble." Likewise, he observed "charcoal" trolley cars, the sides of which collapsed at the touch,

    The scene at Ryogoku Bridge stunned Captain Kubota: a "forest of corpses" packed so closely that they must have been touching as they died. They now had returned to humanity's carbon essence, crumbling at the touch. An even more horrifying vision assaulted him at the Sumida River.

The entire river surface was black as far as the eye could see, black with burned corpses, logs, and who knew what else, but uniformly black from the immense heat that had seared its way through the area as the fire dragon passed. It was impossible to tell the bodies from the logs at a distance. The bodies were all nude, the clothes had been burned away, and there was a dreadful sameness about them, no telling men from women or even children. All that remained were pieces of charred meat. Bodies and parts of bodies were carbonized and absolutely black.

As Kubota watched, angry waves receded from the riverbanks to reveal

stacked in neat precision, as though by some machine ... row upon row of corpses. The instrument was the tide, which had come and gone since the fire storm passed by, leaving rows of bodies like so much cordwood cast up on the beach.... How many bodies had washed out to sea was impossible to tell, but they must have been in the thousands, for there were tens of thousands in the river.

    Kubota ended his tour of horrors and set up his unit in Honjo ward. A stream of injured flooded in, many with searing, painful burns. Virtually without exception, they had conjunctivitis from the heated, smoky winds. But Kubota worried most about the victims of smoke inhalation. One man told him, "It hurts so much I'd like to cut open my chest and let some clear air in." Many thousands died over the next several days, including those with shock and infections for which there was little medicine. Even such fundamental essentials as bandages were in short supply, and doctors were compelled to reuse them as minimum hygiene standards collapsed.

    As the hours of March 10 passed, Kubota was joined by a legion of civil-defense workers who now converged upon the scene, described by a reporter:

On some broad streets, as far as one could see, there was an even row of bodies where men, women and children, trapped by the flames, had futilely tried to escape them by lying down in the center of the paving. There were heaps of bodies in school yards, in parks, in public shelters, in vacant lots, and huddled under railroad viaducts.

For several days, bodies were pulled from the Sumida River and canals, but "often it was impossible to distinguish even the sex of the bodies because they had been so mutilated by the flames," said a Japanese journalist, reiterating a common observation. "We were instructed to report on actual conditions," one Japanese police official later acknowledged, "[but] most of us were unable to do this because of the horrifying conditions beyond imagination."

    It was clear that this was Tokyo's greatest disaster, even surpassing the 1923 earthquake. Of the thirty-five wards of the city, the Home Ministry officially counted "most parts" of five as destroyed: Shitaya, Asakusa, Fukagawa, Honjo, and Joto. Another seven districts were approximately half destroyed: Ashidate, Kanda, Kojima, Nihombashi, Hongo, Shiba, and Arakawa. The destruction gouged out parts of another fourteen wards, for a total of at least twenty-six. American photographic reconnaissance revealed that flames had consumed 15.8 square miles of the city. By American calculation, this included 18 percent of the industrial area and 63 percent of the commercial area. In the explicit ten-square-mile target area, damage totaled 82 percent, with twenty-two industries previously assigned target numbers (meaning they had been identified as having military significance) "and many other unidentified industries ... destroyed or damaged." The American figures did not exaggerate. The Tokyo fire chief listed forty-three factories as damaged. Asakusa ward, "the amusement center of Tokyo" with its restaurants, geisha, and prostitution houses, was virtually leveled, with 99 percent of its rooms (even of the houses still standing) gutted. Japanese calculation ultimately totaled the destruction at 261,000 houses, leaving 1.15 million homeless.

    Knots of survivors and staggering files of the homeless, with "muddied, cinder smeared padding bulged from their quilts, making them look like soiled bandages," floundered through the devastated area looking for aid. The pervasive sense of emergency suspended the customary punctilious insistence on certificates of entitlement for emergency food and shelter. Citizens of Tokyo and surrounding communities freely opened temples, schools, and theaters to house and feed the refugees. Perhaps above all, no documents were demanded of those seeking to evacuate Tokyo by train. Over the course of the next few weeks, more than a million people migrated from the metropolis with speed and determination never roused by official exhortation. More than 90 percent of the refugees found shelter with relatives in nearby prefectures.

    The government organized twenty-nine special trains devoted solely to evacuation, but they could haul only a small percentage of the total. Others took to the roads by bicycle, tricycle, oxcart, and horsecart--any kind of vehicle that did not depend on scarce gasoline--stacked and stuffed with heirlooms, clothes, bedding, kitchen utensils, the assorted accumulations of a million lifetimes, pale babies and tired children sprawled at the tops of the heaps. In an abortive burst of creative thinking, some bureaucrats conceived of transporting the evacuees to the northernmost Home Island, Hokkaido, to toil at farms to ease the food crisis. This scheme foundered from lack of will and energy.

    Whereas after earlier raids the streets had been cleared and utilities and telephones had been restored with reasonable dispatch, now a lethargy of despair retarded or halted such efforts. So great was the blow to morale that even the highest civil-defense authorities abandoned training programs. Instead, they applied what energy they had to evacuation and the further closing of schools in order to free students to labor in factories and on farms.

    The dead also needed tending. Prior to March 10, there had been only 1,292 deaths from all the air raids on Tokyo, and the remains were handled in a planned, orderly system of identification and internment. But in this one night, by actual--and minimum--count, at least 79,466 perished: 64 claimed by families, 1,805 handled by private crematories, 2,495 cremated on the spot, 6,002 identified and buried in temporary individual graves, and 69,100 buried in common pits of groups of up to twenty or more. The very precision of these figures betrays their inadequacy: They account for only identified and counted bodies. The director of health submitted a figure of 83,600, and the later authoritative United States Strategic Bombing Survey report acknowledges that many dead were not counted. A contemporary intercepted coded message from a German attaché, citing Imperial Navy sources, placed the dead at "about 100,000."

    One reason the count could not be stated with absolute certainty was that the recent massive population shifts had left officials without a firm base from which to calculate. Moreover, the raid disrupted the administrative apparatus of the city, and in the devastated wards the dead citizens could not report to the dead civil authorities. Then there was the macabre mechanics of the disaster: Many remains must have been reduced to ash in the intense flames, and the tidal rivers washed many bodies out to sea. Later, a figure of 90,000 to 100,000 came to be accepted, but even these immense totals are sometimes challenged as too low. Whatever the number, it took at least twenty days to clear all the remains.

    On March 10, no newspapers were published in Tokyo, and the city was in disarray save for the incongruous spectacle of a parade of marching soldiers marking Army Day side by side with a stream of refugees. The next day, the Diet was in session, but there was no comment about the raid, and efforts were made to conceal the information within Japan. Within a few hours, however, word began to spread throughout the country.

    Far away, behind the moat of the Imperial Palace at Chiyoda in the center of Tokyo, the Emperor soon heard of the horror. Explorations by his retainers convinced them that the Emperor must be prevented from seeing such sights as the two- or three-foot-high "rice plant mounds" that on close inspection proved to be stacks of melted and fused bodies. But the Emperor would not be denied, and on March 18 he set forth in a general's uniform and riding boots. He had been told the worst tragedy of the raid lay concentrated by the Sumida River, and he directed his caravan to that area. With the red and gold chrysanthemum pennon snapping over a fender, his maroon car rolled past his surprised subjects. Those who quickly recognized His Majesty and bowed in time were repaid with a gracious salute, but mostly his gaze fell over acres of destruction. A military aide later recalled that

the victims, who had been digging through the rubble with empty expressions on their faces, watched the imperial motorcade pass by with reproachful expressions.... Were they grudgeful to the emperor because they had lost their relatives, their houses and belongings? Or were they in a state of utter exhaustion and bewilderment?

At a ramshackle camp of tents and shacks, the Emperor paused for a moment to talk to rag-clad refugees. After being driven a little farther, he halted to talk to survivors. Then he remounted his car and headed back to the Imperial Palace without revealing his inner thoughts.

    Before the calendar ran out on this year, fiery devastation was to come to more than sixty other Japanese cities. Those Japanese not killed in air raids would stand on the precipice of extinction through starvation. A great invasion would be planned but not executed. The Soviet Union would unleash a mechanized assault in Manchuria and plan to seize a Home island. Millions were to die, only a minority of them Japanese, and the Imperial Empire was to vanish in two atomic flashes. The Emperor would play a pivotal role in stanching--but not halting--the bloodshed, and when he did so he was to write a poem:

Thinking of the people dying endlessly in the air raids

I ended the war

Having no thought of my own fate

There might seem to be some solace from the million aggregated horrors of this night in Tokyo to believe that it played some significant role in persuading the Emperor that the war was not only lost but must be halted soon. The story of the events to follow, however, admits of no such ready consolation.

Copyright © 1999 Richard B. Frank. All rights reserved.