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Imagining and Remembering Air Raids on Japan
Organizer and Chair: Cary Karacas, UC Berkeley
Discussants: Mark Selden, The State University of New York at Binghamtom and Andrew Herscher, University of Michigan
Anchoring our approach to the civilian experience of the firebombing of Japan’s cities in 1945, this panel seeks to address ways in which the Japanese public imagined air raids in the years leading up to the catastrophic events, and how it has remembered them in the postwar period. Owen Griffiths and Cary Karacas examine fictional narratives of future air wars directed at youths and adults published from the mid-1910s to the beginning of the Pacific War in 1941. They also compare the vicarious consumption of civilian bombing with the Japanese peoples’ actual experiences during the last, desperate days of the war in order to address, if only partially, how we might understand the relationship between imagination and experience as it relates to war and the conditions under which we would support actions that include air raids conducted against an enemy’s civilian population. Akiko Takenaka, working within a comparative framework that considers the case of Germany, addresses the narrative aftermath of catastrophic experience and issues of war responsibility through an examination of the Association to Remember the Air Raids and the group’s various forms of memory work related to the fire bombing of Japan.
Hot-blooded! Air Power and Future War in Japanese Children’s Media, 1915-1930
Owen Griffiths, Mount Allison University, Canada
Much has been written about the rise of air power in the 20th century, especially regarding the civilian bombing strategies conceptualized in the 1920s and used to horrific effect all too frequently since the late 1930s. While readers of 20th century military history are undoubtedly familiar the development of civilian bombing theories in the 1920s, they may be surprised to learn that the idea of civilian bombings also formed an important component of the “future war” (miraisensô) stories written for Japanese children in the interwar years.
In this paper, I examine the concept of civilian bombing, not from the standpoint of the theorists and military planners, but through the lens of the future war genre of children’s fiction from the mid-1910s to the early 1930s. Focusing on organizations such as “The Society for the Study of Aviation” (Hikôki no kenkyûkai) and its youth magazine Hikôshônen (Boy’s Aviation) and the popular novels of Miyazaki Ichiû and Abû Tempû, my study traces the use of air power and civilian bombings in children’s future war stories to understand how civilian bombing was conceptualized by adults and represented to children years before the technology for such weapons actually existed.
Imagining Urban Catastrophe: Unno Jûza’s Air Raids on the Imperial Capital
Cary Karacas, UC Berkeley
In 1932, Japan’s capital, attacked by the United States, went up in flames. As the incendiary bombs fell around them, panicked masses stampeded over the slow and the elderly in an attempt to escape poison gas and an approaching conflagration. This firebombing, ten years before the first actual air raid on Tokyo, occurred in the imagination of writer Unno Jûza (1897-1949) and the many people who read his serialized fictional account of catastrophe visited upon the city. Throughout the 1930s Unno Jûza penned numerous “air defense novels” (bôkû shôsetsu) that envisioned an enemy country’s planes raining bombs and chaos upon Japan. This was also a decade in which members of the military, Home Ministry bureaucrats, city planners, and informed citizens became increasingly aware of and discussed urban Japan’s vulnerability to air attack. I chart Unno’s changing imagination regarding the effects of his fictional air raids on the imperial capital – from his portrayal of Tokyoites as either panicked masses forsaking the city or as vigilant subjects protecting it, to him ultimately envisioning a dystopian future in which the only relief from bombings is to transform Tokyo into a vast underground city.
Remembering Air-Raids in Japan and Germany
Akiko Takenaka, University of Michigan
Strategic bombing from the air played, for the first time, a crucial role in World War II, damaging and destroying numerous cities, towns and villages in Europe and Asia. It resulted in tremendous losses of lives and property, and ultimately, capitulation of the Axis powers. By the end of the war, 215 Japanese cities had been affected. Over 2.3 million houses were damaged, with the death toll ranging from 330,000 to 900,000 depending on the source. These facts, along with the traumatic, personal narratives of air-raid experience, are driven home in countless publications and exhibits produced by various chapters of the Association to Remember the Air-Raids. Currently, there are at least 60 such groups in Japan, whose explicit aim is peace promotion: to collect, record, and disseminate their air-raid experience, so that the following generation will understand the horrors of war and refrain from repeating the same “mistake.” In Germany, the Allies air-raided 131 towns and cities, resulting in 600,000 civilian deaths and 3.5 million destroyed homes. But as W.G. Sebald points out, the destruction occupies very little space in Germany¹s cultural memory. Even today, the bulk of German memory work associated with World War II is consumed by the Holocaust. Many scholars have analyzed German vs. Japanese attitudes towards war responsibility. But the ways in which these two countries recollect and preserve their wartime experience are rarely discussed together. This paper examines the relationship between the notion of war responsibility and activities related to memory keeping, with a particular focus on how air-raid experiences are remembered, narrated, and politicized in Japan and Germany.