Japan Commemorates Two Disasters: Tohoku/Fukushima And The Firebombing ...

Charred remains of Japanese civilians after the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo. Photograph by Ishikawa Koyo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This Tuesday, March 11, every community in Japan, and every Japanese person wherever living, will solemnly and mournfully commemorate the three year anniversary of the 2011 great Tohoku earthquake/tsunami/Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.

A description of that natural disaster, its immediate aftermath, and lingering effects, provides the introduction, and several of the themes, of an excellent new book on Japan by Financial Times correspondent David Pilling, Bending Adversity-Japan and the Art of Survival.

The March 11, 2011 Tohoku disaster will be noted by major media in every country in the world, and with reason given its epical dimensions. The earthquake began at 2:46 p.m. measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, making it the fourth most powerful earthquake in recorded history. Destructive energy released was the equivalent to some 600 million Hiroshima bombs.

For a large part of Japan, violent buckling and shaking went on for six minutes, seemingly intensifying throughout. Then, some 30 minutes later, the tsunami arrived. In all, some 19,000 died.

Notwithstanding that much recovery and reconstruction work remains to be done in northeast Japan, the effects of the Tohoku disaster are hardly evident now in the rest of the country, except indirectly and largely imperceptibly in the form of slightly higher electricity prices. All but two of Japan's 54 nuclear power plants-previously supplying almost one-third of its electric power-shut down in the days following the Fukushima disaster, remain shut down, their previous output now supplied-in a remarkable feat of engineering under time pressure-by conversion to more costly LNG and petroleum fueled processes.

The Tohoku earthquake/tsunami was a natural disaster, in a country geologically prone to such disasters. But Japan has also suffered its share-or more than its share-of man-made disasters, some self-inflicted and some visited upon it by foreigners.

Of the latter, the one of the most horrendous-its 69th anniversary being commemorated this week by all Japanese media, but hardly noticed abroad-was the U.S. fire bombing raids on Tokyo in the early morning of March 10, 1945.

It has been estimated to be the most single most destructive bombing raid in history. That night, 334 B-29 bombers flew low over a largely defenseless city, dropping napalm incendiary bombs. The bombs and fires destroyed 16 square miles of buildings-largely civilian residences constructed of wood-killing some 100,000 people, and wounding another 150,000, almost all civilians. One million lost their homes.

The immediate death toll was greater than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombs. Firebombing eventually laid waste to some 60% of the entire city area.

An NPO called The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage has a building in Koto district of Tokyo that maintains a permanent exhibition. The NPO seems to have begun collecting artifacts and raising money for construction in 1970, but the building was not completed until 2002. (A history exhibit in the wonderful Edo-Tokyo Museum also covers the period.)

One encounters the phenomenon often in Japan: the inexplicably long deferred, somehow still tentative, or even seemingly furtive individual or community actions taken to commemorate or acknowledge the sacrifices, tragedies, and atrocities suffered by or forced upon others during the 1930s and 1940s.

As Pilling relates in his book, without seeking to minimize the unspeakable brutality and rapacity of Japanese aggression in Asia, and the losses-estimated by the United Nations as 9 million in the war alone, not counting from hunger and disease-the Japanese suffered grievously. Some 1.7 million Japanese military personnel died, as did nearly 400,000 civilians, a total representing some 3 percent of the population. (American forces in the Pacific theater lost 101,000 men, with a further 291,500 wounded.)

Americans cannot pretend to understand what the Japanese endured, nor, as noted in my last post, citing the great historian John W. Dower, the fervent desire of Japan's post-war leadership-representing the country's traumatized and still-mourning citizens-for Japan to be allowed to pursue unarmed neutrality and pacifism when the U.S. occupation finally ended in 1952. U.S. policy in the early years of the Cold War-and in the midst of the Korean War-forbade them to do so, while ensuring continued effective U.S. military occupation.

Neutral and pacifist sentiment still runs deeply and broadly in Japan. It is, I believe, the truest and best path forward for the country and its citizens.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo would appear to have a different vision and agenda: further accommodating Pentagon plans to expand armaments and missions in East Asia, largely aimed at China, from U.S. bases in Japan; adopting a doctrine of 'collective defense' further integrating Japanese forces with those of the U.S.; while also building up Japan's independent defensive and offensive military capabilities.

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