The Optics of Urban Ruination

Introduction

Around the time that General Curtis LeMay boarded a plane in September 1945 to see and photograph for himself the destruction that his bombers had wrought upon Tokyo, a man named Ishikawa Kōyō (1904–1989) went into his backyard and began to dig a hole. ² Once deep enough, he placed a clay pot containing photographic negatives inside the earth. The pictures, taken by Ishikawa in his capacity as an official photographer for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, captured harrowing scenes of the Japanese capital’s destruction by firebombing raids that LeMay had orchestrated over the previous months. Burned into the coating of silver salts on 35-millimeter sheets of acetate were images of flattened landscapes and destroyed buildings amid smoldering ruins, carbonized and asphyxiated bodies, and stunned humans who had survived the incineration of their neighborhoods. Concerned that the American Occupation authorities would confiscate the photographs—among the precious few images showing the immediate aftermath of Tokyo’s air raids—Ishikawa resorted to the desperate measure of burying the visual evidence. ³

His instincts proved well founded. Indeed, when members of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) arrived in Japan in the fall of 1945 to ascertain the effects of the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, they took an immediate interest in acquiring any and all relevant ground photographs. While the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) itself had taken many thousands of aerial photographs of destroyed Japanese cities, these alone did not provide the USSBS with the kind of visual intelligence that would enable it to make sense of the effects of the fires on local populations and urban infrastructures. Ishikawa’s photographs conveyed just this sort of information. And while the exact nature of his interactions with Occupation authorities remains unclear, the fact that some of the USSBS’s confidential reports, published in 1947, featured reprints of his photographs is evidence that he was eventually compelled to exhume his negatives and hand over copies.

Though different in scale, both the Army Air Force aerial photographs and those taken by Ishikawa belong to a subgenre of war photography focused on urban ruinscapes: what scholars have described variously as “dead cities,” “post-mortem cities,” and “ghost cities,” made so through acts of “urbicide,” “domicide,” and “place annihilation.” ⁴ While urban war photography, especially related to the firebombing of Japan’s cities, has not generated considerable sustained study to date, we argue that such images warrant our attention. Building on the groundwork laid by Julia Adeney Thomas, our aim here is to carry out an excavation of the extant body of photographic images related to the destruction of urban Japan in general and of Tokyo in particular in order to elucidate “the network of connotations, practices, and relations of power . . . through which [the photograph] emerged as an object.” ⁵ Informed by Thomas’s important appeal that scholars pursue an archaeological approach to the photograph rather than simply use it as a supportive device to illustrate a written argument, we consider the following examination of the production and use of aerial and ground photos of urban Japan’s destruction as the first step in providing a more thorough understanding of the role of urban war photographs in shaping key chapters in Japan’s urban history as well as the politics of memory in Japan and the United States.

Urban war photography in particular merits such an approach. While much consideration has been given to the question of the efficacy of photographs of war in causing the viewer to take a moral stand against particular atrocities, our position is that one must thoroughly consider all related visual evidence in order to begin to develop an understanding of the effects of war on cities and the citizens residing therein. ⁶ According to Jason Francisco, such an investigation of war photography “demands at least three discrete, simultaneous lines of inquiry”:

first, to determine what photographs were actually made of any given war, by whom and under what circumstances; second, to specify which of these were published and circulated contemporaneously, and in what forms; third, to delineate the ways that photographs subsequently appeared or disappeared from public view, in what contexts and with what impact. ⁷

Adopting such an approach, in this article we carry out a critical examination of two discrete bodies of photographs. The first consists primarily of the large collection of aerial photographs produced by the USAAF between 1944 and 1945 as its XXI Bomber Command—the AAF unit stationed in the Mariana Islands—photographed Japanese cities with its reconnaissance planes and regular B-29 long-range bombers in order to plan, prosecute, and evaluate the efficacy of its air raids. Taken before, during, and immediately after individual firebombing raids that eventually reached almost every city in Japan (with the notable exceptions of Kyoto and the four candidate cities for nuclear attack: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata), this large collection of photographs serves as a repository of visual evidence related to the intentional destruction of urban Japan. After elucidating the history behind the production of these photographs, we examine their use within the Army Air Forces and the known instances in which some of these images were disseminated to the American public during and after the war. We undertake a similar analysis in our consideration of the ground photographs captured by Ishikawa Kōyō, which, while largely ignored in the United States, have become the principal visual testimony in Japan for public memory of the incendiary air raids as they were experienced on the ground—a topic that is yet to receive sustained attention in the English-language literature. Viewed together—as they rarely are—these photographs offer insights into the divergent national narratives put forward by the victor and the vanquished as well as the potential for a transnational treatment of the role of photographs in shaping the politics of memory. In this article, we therefore shift not only between the visual scales and vantage points of the photographs themselves but also across the postwar identities and historical perspectives that have shaped both nation’s efforts to fit the firebombings within larger narratives of World War II.

In the final section we argue that while both aerial and ground photographs related to the destruction of Japan’s cities have their own distinctive merits and demerits, a scalar approach to both sets of photographs—one which telescopes between both perspectives—is a more profitable way to look at, understand, and learn from the visual evidence of the destruction of urban Japan and the tremendous human suffering and displacement it brought about. We contend that a consideration of extant photographs that capture the various visual scales of the city—from topography to neighborhoods to human bodies—is required to better understand the particular ways in which such collective violence inflicted harm upon the Japanese city and its inhabitants. ⁸ Indeed, when considered together, these two bodies of photographs allow us to develop a more “synoptic view” of urban ruination, something which W.G. Sebald and others have promoted. ⁹ Attempting to develop such a view in turn allows for a “gestalt of scale,” which Andrew Herod, working from Neil Smith, defines as “the way in which different scales fit together to form an overall pattern and how looking at them from different perspectives can result in very different understandings of material reality.” ¹⁰ By probing the limits and possibilities of a synoptic view of Japan’s destroyed cityscapes—by being an “attentive viewer” in the Jüngerian sense—we can enrich our understanding not only of the ways in which the material destruction of Japanese cities unfolded over time and space, but also of how that destruction is situated in history, memory, and visual culture.

The Eyes in the Skies

Rigged to kites and balloons, cameras first took flight in the mid-nineteenth century as pioneers in photography sought to capture the bird’s-eye view. It was not long thereafter that the city became the object of its lens. Yielding possibly the first aerial image of an American city, in 1860 James Wallace took his photograph “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Geese See It” from a balloon at 1,200 feet. ¹¹ The earliest aerial picture showing urban destruction is probably George Lawrence’s famous “San Francisco in Ruins” kite photograph taken from 2,000 feet in elevation just weeks after the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of the city. Although principally utilized in the first decades of the twentieth century for practical pursuits such as urban planning and architecture, aerial photography also inspired a mix of awe and fear among the wider public. ¹² No one captured this sentiment better than architect, urbanist, and flight enthusiast Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), who in the 1935 publication Aircraft wrote of the frightening new vantage points on urban life:

But to-day it is a question of the airplane eye, of the mind with which the Bird’s Eye View has endowed us; of that eye which now looks with alarm at the places where we live, the cities where it is our lot to be. And the spectacle is frightening, overwhelming. The airplane eye reveals a spectacle of collapse. ¹³

For Le Corbusier, the bird’s-eye view not only revealed “a synthetic vision of social space” but also objectified the city by reducing urban space to a unified whole that laid bare its vulnerability. After all, “The bird,” he wrote, “can be a dove or a hawk.” And according to Le Corbusier, “It became a hawk. What an unexpected gift to be able to take off at night under the cover of darkness, and away to sow death with bombs upon sleeping towns.” ¹⁴

If aerial photography excited the imaginations of urbanists, architects, and city planners, it spelled a tactical sea change for military strategists in the United States and Europe. ¹⁵ As early as 1893, soldiers were experimenting with the photography of ground sites while hovering hundreds of feet above the military balloon park created at Fort Logan, Colorado. ¹⁶ Such photographic experimentation continued in fits and starts, but was injected with new blood as flying machines established themselves as new tools of warfare and intelligence after the turn of the century. Although early pilots harbored doubts about the ability to fly and photograph at the same time, gradual improvements in camera mounting and photographic technique refined the process, leading many to tout aerial photography as a “new and exact science” of use for fire-fighting, geological surveying, map-making, and warfare alike. ¹⁷

The outbreak of the First World War both heightened societal concern over the vulnerability of cities to aerial attack and stimulated the use of aerial photography as a form of wartime reconnaissance. ¹⁸ The most extreme defensive action taking during the war was the French subterfuge to dupe German pilots into bombing at night an illuminated miniature model of Paris constructed fifteen miles outside of the capital. ¹⁹ Offensively, aerial photography, employed principally as a means to map out enemy trenches, firmly established itself as a mainstay of tactical and strategic intelligence operations. Airmen attached to the United States Army Air Service took almost eighteen thousand photographs as they flew over enemy territory (into which they also released more than two hundred thousand pounds of explosives in 215 sorties). Once they developed the negatives, technicians produced over a half million prints of these aerial photos, which military officers then used to analyze enemy positions and plan for future attacks. ²⁰

Although aerial camera technology advanced rapidly in the private sector during the interwar years, the development of military air intelligence stagnated, due in large part to the U.S. government’s fiscal austerity and reluctance to invest in air power during a time of peace. ²¹ The 1920s did, however, witness various forms of small-scale experimentation and technological development (such as the use of magnesium flares for night time photography). ²² While conflicts such as the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War saw a remarkable expansion in the uses of aerial photography abroad, air intelligence remained a largely academic exercise in the United States until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which laid bare the inadequacies of American intelligence in the Pacific region, especially as related to key sites of industry spread throughout the Japanese Empire. ²³

Thereafter, Henry “Hap” Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, ordered that photographic intelligence and reconnaissance become a central function of the AAF’s Intelligence Branch. Photographic officers, dubbed by one publication as “America’s Secret Agent No. 1,” were trained to supervise the photographic mapping of enemy territory, oversee all aerial photographers, ensure the proper operation and repair of photographic equipment, and manage mobile and fixed laboratories. ²⁴ All AAF enlisted men learned photo-interpretation as part of their basic training, and some continued with four months’ additional training to learn to operate cameras or run photo labs. AAF pilots, moreover, took two-month-long courses related to aerial photography. ²⁵ While U.S. air intelligence in the European theater largely played a supporting role to Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF), it was a chief priority in the Pacific theater, where most photo intelligence officers found themselves at work. ²⁶ Seeking maps, photographs, travel accounts, and other intelligence bearing on the newly opened battlegrounds of the Asia-Pacific region, the U.S. government also dispatched a motley crew of agents into the field to collect any and all photographic intelligence pertinent to the war. ²⁷

Photographs of Japan’s cities were critical to this intelligence effort. As with other forms of spatial data, the U.S. first relied on what the Japanese themselves had produced. While not significant in number, low-level aerial photographs of Japan’s major cities formed the foundation of a collection of images that circulated among intelligence specialists attached to the AAF. Not surprisingly, Tokyo, Japan’s most photographed city in the early twentieth century, featured prominently. Beginning in the early 1930s, the capital became the subject of numerous pictorial books, all of which now included aerial photographs. ²⁸ Few who opened the popular photography book Dai tōkyō shashin annai (A Photographic Guide to Greater Tokyo), published in 1933, could have imagined that in only a dozen years the very photographs used to celebrate the rebuilding of Tokyo in the wake of the catastrophic 1923 Kantō Earthquake would be put to use in laying waste to the city once again. ²⁹

Such photographs made their way into a variety of AAF planning documents, including the Air Objective Folder, No 90.17, Tokyo Area. Issued in September of 1943, the report profiled a lengthy list of designated targets, with the target’s name, latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, description, and significance. It also included dozens of oblique aerial photographs, most taken in the 1930s, that focus on those very features of the city being celebrated in the aforementioned Japanese-language publications (e.g. Tokyo Central Station—Target 367). One stunning 1930 vertical photograph featured in the report covers thirty square miles of the city’s densely populated Shitamachi area, which became the first major urban target area for American bombers in 1945. Many of the designated targets such as aircraft plants and munitions manufacturers are incontestably martial in nature. Others, including electric power plants, may be said to have had a dual use. Still others had a more non-military nature, such as Target 1448, the Tsukiji Market and Wholesale Warehouse, deemed Tokyo’s “most important food distributing center.” ³⁰ Taken together, these photographs display the patchwork nature of the target information and aerial intelligence the U.S. military had at its disposal. Based in part on intelligence shared by the British, the report provides a detailed assessment, accompanied by numerous photographs and maps, of a large number of industrial, military, and political sites of Japan’s capital. ³¹ Though certainly helpful for profiling potential targets, the scant prewar photographs of Japanese cities and other strategic sites were doubtless inadequate for the purposes of the AAF’s stated doctrine of high-altitude precision bombing. ³²

Analysts attached to the AAF also scoured the photographic collections of travelers, missionaries, and the even the popular magazine National Geographic, the latter of which furnished nearly thirty thousand photos that were “used in briefing flyers on landmarks and bombing targets, showing invasion forces how shorelines look, identifying cities, railroad stations, and factories.” ³³ Until reconnaissance planes regularly appeared over Japan’s skies beginning in late 1944, they would have to rely on such images. So meager was the photo intelligence available to the AAF’s Twentieth Bomber Command that in its first air raid on the Japanese archipelago in June 1944, when it targeted the Imperial Iron and Steel Works plant in Yawata, Kyushu, the only images available at a pre-bombing briefing were a 1928 ground photograph showing the area containing the plant and a smattering of other less-then-helpful photographs. ³⁴

Although the AAF was still without any of its twelve long-range reconnaissance planes (then being modified from B-29 airplanes at a Denver, Colorado, airfield), its Twentieth Bomber Command, charged with the destruction of “Japanese industrial establishments” in Asia and Japan proper, nevertheless hastened to gather aerial photographs. From its base in Chengdu, China, the command dispatched more than two hundred fifty photo-reconnaissance missions throughout much of Asia to photograph industrial and urban sites in the Japanese-held cities of Hankow, Anshan, Palanbang, Penang, Bangkok, and Saigon. These missions also served to expedite the mapping efforts of much of northern China, Manchuria, and the Korean peninsula. ³⁵ The seizure of the Mariana Islands, however, a Pacific Ocean chain of island redoubts roughly fifteen hundred miles from Tokyo, marked a decisive turning point in the operational capacity for aerial photography of the Japanese homeland, allowing for a far-reaching reconnaissance operation that yielded a wide range of photo intelligence.

The Manual to B-29 Flight Operations, the operational guide distributed to all flight crewmembers, offers a sense of the centrality of aerial photography to the USAAF mission in the Pacific. It includes a long section on the techniques and procedures of flight mission photography, and addresses the various photographic responsibilities of each crewmember. Radiomen and navigators all had at their side handheld K-20 cameras for opportunity shots; gunners often utilized gun-mounted cameras that allowed them to shoot both simultaneously (of particular utility for flak studies); and bombardiers operated bomb-mounted cameras, which automatically triggered with the release switch. Pilots, for their part, were instructed to maintain a steady altitude, speed, and bearing during reconnaissance missions to allow for accurate “photo-mapping.” Upon their return, they were also required to “complete a ‘pilot’s trace’ on a map showing the flight lines over which photography was accomplished, labeled with the type of cameras operating over the indicated flight lines.” ³⁶

On November 1, 1944, an F-13 flew the first photo-reconnaissance mission over Tokyo, where from thirty-two thousand feet it took more than seven thousand photographs. ³⁷ Although the crew trained their lenses principally on the Nakajima Aircraft Factory and related military sites in the sparsely populated western portion of the Tokyo metropolis, they also took many pictures of the ward area of the capital, home to over six million people and ultimately the chief target zone for the firebombings of Tokyo that began a few months later. Not surprisingly, Japanese residents below looked in awe at the lone American plane, far out of range of anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes. The moment revealed as much for the Tokyoites on the ground below as it did for the men flying the plane. For the reconnaissance crew, the trip produced so many photographs it would take weeks before they could process, let alone analyze, them all back in Guam. For the Tokyoites on the ground, the trip produced a foreboding sense of the changing tides of the Pacific War. Returning home after seeing the plane that day, the intellectual Kiyosawa Kiyoshi would write in his diary, “If it is said that they cannot be shot down above the capital, then the reports of tens of planes being shot down outside of Japan is probably a lie.” ³⁸ Up until the first air raid on Tokyo from the Mariana Islands on November 24, reconnaissance planes made another seventeen trips to photograph Japan’s cities. ³⁹

Official responsibility for capturing the “the long-hidden face of Japan” rested with the 3rd Reconnaissance Squadron. ⁴⁰ Operating seven fixed cameras—equipped with six-, fourteen-, and forty-inch lenses—strategically positioned in each of the few dozen F-13 reconnaissance planes eventually stationed in the Marianas, crewmembers made many dozens of sorties to the Japanese archipelago, “searching out industry . . . mapping cities, spotting airfields and gun positions and occasionally taking a squint down Hirohito’s chimney.” ⁴¹ Pictorial evidence of this last claim was provided with an accompanying photograph that showed a detailed close-up of the Imperial Palace. By mid-April 1945 the squadron had photographed almost seven hundred thousand square miles of Japan. ⁴²

After reconnaissance planes made the rough landing on air strips carved out of jungle just a few months prior, photo officers unloaded the catch of the day (as much as six thousand feet of film per plane), and brought the multiple film canisters to the processing labs, at first housed in two tents until a construction battalion built a permanent structure in March 1945. Men attached to the 35th Photo Tech Unit ran the lab, making 1.5 million prints from negatives and another 1.9 million photo reproductions by the time the war came to a close (see Figure 1). ⁴³

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Figure 1.

Photo-interpreters in Saipan assembling mosaics of aerial photographs.

Upon their being printed, the images underwent a three-step analysis. The first phase entailed a cursory “flash interpretation,” standardized to last but a few hours, of the images for any photographic coverage of operational intelligence of immediate value to commanders in the field. During the second phase a larger unit of seasoned photo-interpreters (trained in the use of stereo vision, magnifiers, and shadow effects) carried out a daylong systematic analysis of the images, studying them in conjunction with other forms of intelligence such as extant photographs, maps, and written reports. ⁴⁴ Photo-interpreters then issued reports on topics that included “urban area analysis” and “urban damage assessment.” The former involved “zoning of urban areas on controlled mosaics for industrial, residential, mixed industrial and residential, and transportation structures” in order to assist with the planning of attacks on Japanese cities. ⁴⁵

High-level intelligence officers stationed in the field or analysts in Washington, D.C., completed the final review stage by interpreting photographs deemed of particular strategic importance. The Joint Target Group (JTG) was instrumental to this photographic inspection. Composed of economic experts and military strategists, the Washington-based group assumed primary responsibility for selecting Japanese targets for bombardment beginning in September 1944. ⁴⁶ In addition to commissioning detailed research on the effects of bombing on Japan’s ability to prosecute the war, the JTG created “target folders” to be used in the planning of each specific attack made by the AAF against a Japanese city. These folders contained a “target information sheet, mosaic maps, a fire susceptibility plan, and any other pertinent data,” as well as 1:6,000 or 1:12,000 photographs of each target. ⁴⁷

Using these and other materials, war planners and strategists set into motion the tactical shift to incendiary area raids on Japanese cities. Stemming from the unsatisfactory results of the precision bombing doctrine, a long-standing perception that Japan’s cities were uniquely vulnerable to fire, and research into the high concentration of war industries in Japan’s cities, the USAAF proceeded with the “burn jobs” and “milk runs” that would lay waste to sixty-five cities—large and small—over the months to follow. Aerial photographs, of course, informed decisions about this shift to incendiary area raids at all levels of strategic planning.

Such photographs were used not only to plan and prosecute the destruction of urban Japan, but also to mold perceptions—both in and outside of the military—of this bombing campaign. One of the chief vehicles for the internal circulation of aerial photographs was Air Intelligence Digest, a weekly pictorial report of the XXI Bomber Command geared toward combat crews and staff officers based on the Mariana Islands. Although some photographs showed individually targeted structures such as an aircraft engine plant or an industrial chemical plant, many were of cities in the midst of their destruction or soon thereafter. Particularly revealing are the captions that accompany these photographs. Some are factual, such as “Sakai under attack by 73rd wing on night of 9-10 July,” while others take a more flavorful tone: “Osaka got the incendiary treatment,” “B29s create more garden plots,” and “791 tons of incendiaries are apparently settling down to a good night’s work.” ⁴⁸ Accompanying a photograph of four B29’s each dropping a full load of incendiary bomb clusters, one caption invites the reader to use their imagination to gain a sense of the rain of ruin that fell upon one of Japan’s largest cities: “To picture the shower that practically erased the industrial city of Yokohama on 29 May, multiply by one hundred this sky full of incendiaries being released.” ⁴⁹

Only rarely did the more extended text that accompanied these photos mention the people inhabiting Japan’s cities. According to one report, an April 13–14 raid on a part of Tokyo that “destroyed 10.7 square miles of the Emperor’s city” had a 1940 population density of up to “80,000 per square mile, pretty thick by Western Standards.” ⁵⁰ Burning Japan’s cities became so central to the XXI Bomber Command’s actions from March 1945 onward that doing otherwise merited attention. “The Bomber Command pulled a bit of a razzle-dazzle maneuver on 9 June,” went an Air Intelligence Digest report, “departing from its systematic destruction of Japanese cities to hit three separate pin-point targets on the same day.” ⁵¹

As will be discussed in detail below, some of these photos also made their way into the public sphere, where they served to drum up support for the air war in the Pacific. While it is critical to note that such aerial photographs helped create and perpetuate public perceptions in the United States of Japanese urban spaces as singularly military or industrial and thus worthy of indiscriminate destruction, it is also important to consider their memorial value—that is, their potential as “a trigger for the sort of ethical response central to the act of bearing witness.” ⁵² At the core of the aerial photograph, argues Davide Deriu, sits a tension between surveillance and spectacle, between actionable intelligence and visual artifact, making it imperative that we also consider the ways in which the urban erasure captured in these photographs stirs our moral and ethical response. But while Deriu does much to elucidate the dynamic potential of aerial photographs as rich “visual monuments” shaping memory as much as history, his singular focus on the aerial photograph by default ignores the same potential latent in other types and scales of photographs of urban destruction. For this, we must turn to Ishikawa Kōyō, the chief visual documentarian of the multiple air raids directed against the Japanese capital, whose efforts to photograph wartime Tokyo enable us to picture the experience of these air raids on the ground. ⁵³

Ishikawa Ko–yo–: Calamity’s Witness

Prior to the arrival of the air war to the Japanese homeland, Ishikawa had already demonstrated tremendous range as a photographer. While earning a living in the 1930s by documenting accident sites and illicit activities for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, he regularly trained his camera’s lens on the rapidly changing scenes of everyday life in the capital. His early portfolio thus stands as something of a homage to an increasingly modernized Tokyo. ⁵⁴ In 1931, Ishikawa walked through key sections of the capital with his Leica camera in hand, taking photographs of electric trams passing the Matsuzakaya Department Store in Ueno, cafés in Kōenji, and schoolgirls window-shopping in the Ginza. His camera thereafter captured darker, more ominous scenes: a shot from 1935 of the visiting titular head of the puppet state of Manchukuo sitting next to Emperor Hirohito as they rode in a horse-drawn carriage through the Yoyogi parade ground; a shot of a wintery February day in 1936 when a group of radicalized soldiers attempted a violent coup d’état; a shot from 1937 of drafted men bowing before the Meiji Shrine before leaving to fight in the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was not long before Ishikawa also turned his attention to the various drills forced upon Tokyoites. Air defense drills. Shelter drills. Civil defense drills. Firefighting drills. All became a recurring theme of Ishikawa’s photography in the late 1930s, and increasingly so following the first U.S. air raid on Tokyo in April 1942.

The commencement of sustained American air raids on Tokyo in late 1944 prompted a further shift in Ishikawa’s documentary duties. Upon returning to the darkroom at the Metropolitan Police headquarters to process the images he had taken of the damage wrought by the first major raid on the capital on November 24, Ishikawa was summoned to the office of his section chief, who told him that more destructive raids on Tokyo were all but certain. Disappointed with the paucity and quality of official photographic documentation of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake that destroyed much of the capital, the section chief made the following request:

I’m wondering if I could get you to continue to take photographs that faithfully capture (kokumei ni toritsuzukete) the efforts of the police and fire-fighting forces at these bombed out areas, as well as the condition of the damage . . . . we want you to hasten to the scenes of bombings in order to take photos that compellingly capture their reality (hakushinryoku no aru shashin). You should of course recognize the danger in this job. ⁵⁵

Ishikawa’s charge was to produce what he and his superiors routinely described as “lasting images.” ⁵⁶ In this respect, he belonged to a small group of photographers exempted from a 1943 Ministry of Home Affairs statute prohibiting Japanese citizens from taking photographs of bombed-out areas so as to prevent their unauthorized dissemination. Over the following months, air raid sirens became Ishikawa’s call to duty.

He would then speed in a used Chevrolet on loan from the police department, cherished Leica camera by his side, toward the falling bombs. The first B-29 air raids on Tokyo, directed at the Nakajima Aircraft Engine Works plant, required a ten-mile drive west from the city center to the sparsely populated Musashino region of the metropolis. Beginning in January 1945, however, his trips were shortened to a matter of minutes when bombers began to target Tokyo’s more densely populated areas. Ishikawa’s photographs of these air raids powerfully convey the fact that, despite America’s rhetorical commitment to precision bombings, these attacks on strategic sites often took housing and civilians with them. Human bodies are seen in his photos scattered near the entrance to the train station in the Yūrakuchō district, and firemen are shown attempting to put out flames near the Kyukyodo stationary store in the neighboring Ginza area. Photographs of air raids in January and February that targeted the city center provided Ishikawa and other authorities a glimpse of what was to come—many times over—that March.

The night of March 9, 1945, began like most others, with Ishikawa listening to the radio in his office at the main police station. He began to ready his camera equipment just before midnight upon receiving reports of a large number of enemy planes heading toward Tokyo. After hearing the collective roar of the first waves of hundreds of low-flying B-29s, however, Ishikawa knew that this raid was unlike the others. He first watched “the dreadful spectacle” from the roof of the Metropolitan Police Headquarters as tons of incendiaries fell on the city, but it was not long until he was speeding down Shōwa Dōri, one of the capital’s main thoroughfares, toward the Asakusa artisanal and working-class district, which AAF commanders had designated as part of the main target zone. With flames enveloping his field of vision, Ishikawa detoured to a police station in nearby Ryōgoku, where he discovered the police chief at his desk completing paperwork before abandoning the station to the encroaching flames. ⁵⁷

What followed were, according to Ishikawa, scenes from hell. His detailed account of that evening indeed repeatedly invokes infernal metaphors to describe Tokyo’s destruction. The “demon’s wings” ⁵⁸ (akuma no tsubasa) rained fire that carbonized corpses which “flowed through the streets like rapids.” ⁵⁹ The elements also conspired against the city to whip up the red winds (akakaze) that fanned the firestorms: “immense incandescent vortices,” he wrote, “rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into a maelstrom of fire.” ⁶⁰ Widespread chaos, intense heat, and the realization of the need to save his own life prevented Ishikawa from taking any photographs. His Chevrolet destroyed by flames, he slowly made his way on foot back to the Metropolitan Police Headquarters. After resting his fatigued body, at around 2 p.m. on March 10 Ishikawa set out to document the aftermath. He saw bodies “piled like mountains” (shitai no yama o kizuiteita) and corpses burnt to the point that “you could no longer discern the sex of the body” (danjyo no kubetsu mo tsukanai shitai). ⁶¹ Ishikawa first told himself not to photograph such upsetting images, but then, recalling his responsibilities to capture the “reality of the scenes,” he began to snap the shutter.

That day Ishikawa took thirty-three photographs of the aftermath of what came to be called the Great Tokyo Air Raid. Conveying a variety of scenes and scales, these images shed light on the moments that immediately followed the firebombing. We bear witness to an entire neighborhood reduced to smoldering rubble; homeless monpe-clad women and children carrying their only possessions in bundles on their backs; and the various ways in which the air raid brought death to tens of thousands of civilian bodies. ⁶² In one photograph, a group of men pull corpses out of the Kikukawa canal located in the former Honjo Ward, providing corroborating visual evidence to the many survivor accounts that tell of people jumping into the water to escape the encroaching flames. Other photographs expose the terrible reality that so many faced as they found themselves surrounded by fires, intentionally created by the AAF in such a way as to block most possibilities of escape.

No photograph taken by Ishikawa challenges us in this regard more than that of the oya-ko, the (presumably) mother and child (Figure 2). Centered on the carbonized corpses of an adult female and an infant by her side, the photograph powerfully conveys the bodily scale of human suffering that took place within the larger landscape of ruination. The intensity of the conflagration as it felled and burned alive the adult while she attempted to flee to safety is marked by the charred bodies of both the female and infant. Particularly arresting are the small patches of bare skin visible on the female’s lower-back, a visual marker that she had carried the infant on her back until being felled by the fire. One aspect of the photograph that further imbues it with meaning is the position of the adult’s body, with the head and one leg raised in the air. The viewer is struck with a sense of motion, a sense that she was making one final attempt to raise herself and child amid the flames.

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Figure 2.

Ishikawa Ko–yo– photograph of an adult female and infant killed by the conflagration created by the firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945.

While photographs such as this one provide an intimate sense of the bodily pain that was inflicted by the firebombing, they also require much of the viewer. It is one thing to look at such photographs; it is another thing altogether to comprehend or attach meaning to the actual suffering it exposes. This, of course, is far from an original observation: photography critics from Roland Barthes to Susan Sontag have long sought to make sense of the “painful labor” inherent to comprehending photographs of violence, pain, and suffering. ⁶³ Sharon Sliwinski perhaps puts this line of thinking most succinctly when she observes that “encountering images of suffering illuminates the limit of the ability to respond.” ⁶⁴

But while difficult to comprehend, Ishikawa’s photographs at the very least bear witness to this suffering. Perhaps the most salient feature of his images is that they point to, often in upsetting detail, the ultimate victims of the decision to target Japan’s cities for destruction. In this sense, these photographs merit juxtaposition with the thousands of aerial photographs (and their attendant captions) that mask the bodily scale. Curtis Lemay, a chief proponent of the shift to area incendiary raids against Japan’s cities, threw this point into sharp relief when he stated the day after the Great Tokyo Air Raid that “fire left nothing but twisted, tumbled down rubble in its path. These facts are incontrovertibly established by reconnaissance photographs taken on the afternoon of the strike.” ⁶⁵ For Lemay, as others, the thousands of post-strike aerial photographs of Tokyo conveyed but one scale of destruction to the capital (see Figure 3). Indeed, when looking at such aerial images, the viewer is given the impression that nothing remained following the conflagration. They fail to reveal what Ishikawa’s photographs show: the civilian suffering that occurred at the scale of the lived urban spaces and, most principally, the body.

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Figure 3.

Aerial photograph of Tokyo taken the day after the March 10, 1945 air raid and reprinted in The New York Times on March 14.

In this sense, Ishikawa’s pictures subvert the aerial photograph, which misleadingly show “nothing but rubble” in the wide swaths of light grey that dominate the post-strike images. Demonstrating to the viewer that the fire did leave something besides physical debris, Ishikawa’s pictures—upon being seen and considered—form a principal currency in what Elizabeth Spelman terms the “economy of circulation” that “organizes our attention to suffering”:

Photographs of this kind burn into memory: it is hard to forget them, even when we want to do so. . . . [A] brief look, and the contours of consciousness are changed. Receptivity to such photographs is partly a matter of individual temperament and conviction but also a matter of social location, collective identification, and political affiliation. The meaning and effects of the images are at once singular and shared, intimate and public. ⁶⁶

Ishikawa’s photographs, however, needed to circulate in order to allow for the creation of such an “economy of attention,” and it is to the dissemination of these images that we now turn.

The Comparative Economics of Attention

We now undertake a brief survey of the ways in which aerial and ground photographs circulated beyond their original provenance within classified government documents to the greater public in both the United States and Japan. In so doing, we seek to clarify the ways in which the public circulation—or lack thereof—of photographs has shaped particular Japanese and American attitudes toward the experience of World War II and the incendiary bombing of urban Japan. Such an analysis, we submit, will not only throw into relief the contours of the debates over the politics of memory but also hint at the possibilities and limitations inherent to the act of consuming images of urban ruination. ⁶⁷

A fundamental but hitherto neglected aspect of the intentional targeting of Japan’s cities involved the need to ensure that the American public would not question an approach to warfare that the U.S. government itself had condemned before its own entrance into World War II. Thus, concomitant with the eventual embrace of razing Japan’s cities as a legitimate military strategy was the formation of a wartime sensibility that cast the Japanese as an enemy deserving of such attacks. Wartime rhetoric provided copious material for the collective dehumanization of the Japanese people into, among numerous appellations, “blood-sucking parasites” and “a preposterous musical comedy species of humanity.” ⁶⁸ Immediately following the initiation of hostilities, Americans both created and encountered a plethora of such crass linguistic and visual references. Within a few weeks of the attack on Pearl Harbor, for example, Lucky Miller and His Orchestra sang “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap,” and in 1942 the Music Operator Bang belted out “Bomb Tokyo.” ⁶⁹

The desire for air raids on Japan’s cities became a common refrain throughout the war. Following the Japanese bombing of Manila in late December 1942, U.S. Senators were quoted in The New York Times as noting the vulnerability of Japan’s cities and calling for them to be bombed at the earliest possible moment—the only fitting response to, as one senator put it, “an inhuman and half-civilized race.” ⁷⁰ In another example, Harper’s Magazine advocated for the destruction of Japan’s “paper-and-plyboard” cities as a way to end the war. ⁷¹ In these and other ways, we see the formation of an American public sphere that, unlike that in Britain, did little to question the targeting and indiscriminate bombing of Japan’s cities. ⁷²

It follows that, as George Roeder has suggested, “despite the difficulty of evaluating how visual imagery affect individual and collective attitudes,” wartime photographs, images, and movies that featured negative representations of the Japanese had a pronounced impact on Americans. ⁷³ In this respect, images played a pivotal role in casting the Japanese as an enemy-other and promoting the idea of the Japanese city as a target. To provide but one example, posters of “Tokio Kid,” a “gargoyle-like cartoon character” with long teeth and claws, first graced the walls of Douglas Aircraft and its suppliers in order to encourage workers to become more efficient. The U.S. Treasury Department then used the same image to promote the purchase of war bonds. ⁷⁴

Representations of Japan’s cities were no less instrumental to the making of the Japanese enemy. Of particular importance were the numerous aerial photographs released for publication in U.S. newspapers and pictorial weeklies by the AAF. The first of these images ran in a January 1945 issue of Life magazine under the title “Tokyo Exposed.” Taken during the aforementioned first aerial reconnaissance mission the previous November, the cropped photograph shows the working-class Shitamachi area of the capital. The accompanying text orients the reader to “the industrial and slum section” of Tokyo, with its “odorous, slimy Sumida [River] from whose banks drunken coolies watch boat races.” ⁷⁵ A February 1945 issue of Life ran a ten-page “On to Tokyo” story in which it lamented that “Japan’s cities . . . have notably failed to burn down as scheduled.” ⁷⁶ The large-scale incendiary bombing of urban Japan that commenced the following month, however, provided the AAF with many photographs to distribute to the American public, some of which appeared in The New York Times, Life, and other publications over the coming months.

Upon Japan’s capitulation, the American military had its first opportunity to closely inspect the damage it had wrought upon urban Japan. In addition to sending members of the USSBS to numerous cities in order to visually ascertain the damage, the government also worked to secure relevant photographs and moving images. ⁷⁷ As historian John Dower notes, American forces confiscated all of the documentary film of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that dozens of cameramen had collected over a period of months. ⁷⁸ While intent upon preventing American forces from confiscating his negatives, Ishikawa, too, was compelled to provide copies of some of his photographs, which subsequently appeared in two confidential publications issued by the USSBS in 1947. The Effects of Bombing on Health and Medical Services in Japan, for example, produced by the USSBS’s Medical Division based on a five-week survey conducted in the fall of 1945, featured eight of Ishikawa’s most harrowing images of corpses. Frustrated by the Japanese government’s poor record-keeping regarding air raid casualties from the firebombing of Japan’s cities (especially when compared to that of the German government), the Medical Division had no choice but to rely on a variety of incomplete reports from various governmental ministries and local authorities. Ishikawa’s photographs, however, allowed them to fashion a narrative description of bodily harm:

Following the fires it was common to find burned corpses littering the streets of the burned areas. Some were lying in positions in which they had fallen, others were in positions suggesting that they had attempted to rise after falling but were unable to continue, and still others were in groups as if they had huddled together for mutual protection. Many were burned beyond recognition, the remains actually consisting of the skeleton with only charred remnants of clothing and soft tissues. . . . Mothers were found with infants on their backs or clutching at their sides. In all of these instances when the bodies were sufficiently intact, there was evidence of a struggle to escape the heat and flames. ⁷⁹

Although Ishikawa’s images featured in these confidential USSBS reports would not appear in any English-language publications widely available to the public until the 1960s, other images related to the air raids on urban Japan—those of the atomic bombings—were released to the American public at a much earlier date. While censored in postwar Japan, photographs of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were published widely in the United States beginning in August 1945. One such instance was in the August 20, 1945, edition of Life, the cover of which features a four-star general, the “Bomber of Japan,” sitting in front of a map of Asia, with a cigarette held to his lips as he stares directly at the camera. He is Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of the newly organized U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific. Inside the magazine are the two mushroom cloud photographs on opposite pages with the accompanying captions: “Hiroshima—Atom Bomb No. 1 Obliterated It” and “Nagasaki—Atom Bomb No. 2 Disemboweled It.” The photo essay also features “before” and “after” aerial photographs of Hiroshima. While such photographs became part and parcel of the stock of visual images regularly used to transmit to the American public the end of the war and the beginning of the atomic age, it is important to note that in between these two sets of images are aerial photographs of the cities of Yokohama and Kobe afire. An attendant caption mentions “cracked limbs and gashed skulls”—not of the Japanese but of the B-29 crew members whose planes experienced extreme turbulence caused by the superheated air rising from the burning cities. The text goes on to mention how a “good-sized ‘burn job’ did almost as much damage to property as the atomic bomb did and it also killed almost as many people.” ⁸⁰

While Americans had an opportunity to read about the experiences of a handful of atomic bomb survivors when the New Yorker magazine published John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” in August 1946 (the Japanese public was not able to read a translation until 1949), ground images that captured suffering and death of individuals were prohibited from publication in both countries out of concern that they would generate criticism of the U.S. government. ⁸¹ The first collection of ground photographs of Nagasaki was published in a 1952 Japanese-language book featuring the work of Yamahata Yōsuke, a propaganda photographer for the Japanese News and Information Bureau during the war. Assigned to photograph the city the day after the nuclear blast, Yamahata took over one hundred photographs, many of which captured haunting images of the wounded, dying, and dead. The book became a bestseller and signaled a break with the various forms of censorship under which the Japanese had lived during the Occupation. ⁸² Soon thereafter, Life magazine published its own photo-essay that featured a sampling of Yamahata’s photographs. Significantly, the publication of these photographs touched off a public debate in the pages of Life about the morality of the bombing of Japan’s cities that give a sense of the two poles of responses that are representative perspectives to this very day. “I . . . am hardened to shock,” wrote Faye Johnson of Arkansas in a Letter to the Editor, “but when I saw the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki I nearly wept. That we perpetrated this horror against innocent victims is almost unbelievable.” Mrs. Max Dalton of Utah wrote a response more closely resembling the official position of the U.S. government: “Terrible and shocking! But no more so than those endless rows of neat, white American crosses.” ⁸³ This tension in the United States as to how to remember the destruction of two Japanese cities, in addition to how to look at related photographs, would remain over the ensuing decades. ⁸⁴

Ishikawa’s photographs were mostly ignored in the United States, and did not achieve sustained attention in Japan until around 1970. One reason for this was a general reluctance in Japan to remember much about the Asia-Pacific War save for the atomic bombings, which, according to Julia Adeney Thomas, escaped “general amnesia on the war and are much more frequently and openly discussed and represented in the visual arts.” ⁸⁵ It is important to acknowledge, however, that, similar to the publication of Yamahata’s photographs of Nagasaki, immediately following the end of the occupation, on August 15, 1953, a small publisher released Tōkyō daikūshū hiroku shashinshū (The secret photographic record of the Great Tokyo Air Raids), which drew heavily from Ishikawa’s hundreds of images. The reader in fact is immediately confronted on the very first page by one of Ishikawa’s more haunting photographs: that of a few dozen bodies (incinerated during a major raid on May 25, 1945) lined up in two rows in front of a brick wall. ⁸⁶

While many Japanese citizens proved reluctant to revisit the harrowing experiences of the air raids, a few pioneering intellectuals and citizen activists eventually began an effort to systematically recover memories of the air raids. The establishment of the Society for the Recording of the Tokyo Air Raids (Tōkyō kūshū o kiroku suru kai) in 1970 ushered forth a new era in which Tokyoites, with the financial assistance of a supportive governor, began to assemble archival documents and survivor testimonies as a means of ensuring that the destruction of Tokyo would not be forgotten. Photographs were central to the project. In addition to traveling to the National Archives in the United States to acquire copies of AAF aerial photographs, representatives of the group used and positioned Ishikawa’s images as the most effective visual evidence to communicate both at home and abroad the firebombing of their city. ⁸⁷ For example, when invited to appear at an international peace conference in Budapest in May 1971, Saotome Katsumoto, a central figure in the movement to remember the air raids on urban Japan, brought a compilation of Ishikawa’s photographs in order to “exhibit” the destruction of Tokyo.

Increasingly, Ishikawa’s photographs gained currency as some of the most compelling images of the destructive potential of firebombs and American air power—an issue that was gaining international salience due in no small part to the then escalating incendiary bombing campaigns in Indochina being carried out by the United States. In this respect, Ishikawa’s photographs merit comparison to those of Erich Andres, whose photographs of the destruction of Hamburg have garnered similar international attention and contributed to German debates about remembrance and loss at home under the pall of the Holocaust and Germany’s defeat. ⁸⁸

Due in part to the efforts of the Society for Recording the Tokyo Air Raids and the subsequent nationwide expansion of the group, the early 1970s also saw a widening of public engagement with the remembrance of the air raids on Japan’s cities. For the first time in a quarter century, the Japanese media began to feature stories about the firebombings, with widely circulating weekly periodicals including Shūkan Gendai and Shūkan Yomiuri running long articles in which Ishikawa’s photographs played a prominent role (Figure 4). ⁸⁹ While the jarring images of corpses—rendered all the more so when placed next to advertisements for consumer goods available to an increasingly affluent population—may seem to be out of place in magazines directed at the general public, their presence bespeaks the Japanese media’s belated embrace of the destruction of cities other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a topic worthy of attention.

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Figure 4.

A February 25, 1971 issue of the popular weekly Shu–kan Gendai featuring Ishikawa Ko–yo–’s photographs in an article about the firebombing of Tokyo.

Photographic consumption took other forms as well. An exhibition of Ishikawa’s photographs at the Asaskusa’s Matsuya Department Store in 1972 represented the first opportunity for the Japanese public to see his images in a gallery-like setting (Figure 5). That these photographs were exhibited in a space situated in the heart of the “target zone” devastated by U.S. bombers doubtless heightened the power of the display. Boosted by such exhibits, the publication of numerous books about the firebombing of urban Japan, the establishment of a resource center in Tokyo that has a permanent photo exhibit, and the use of his photographs (and personal story) in a number of documentaries, Ishikawa’s profile and the dissemination of his images steadily increased over the ensuing decades. ⁹⁰

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Figure 5.

Ishikawa Ko–yo–’s photographs on public display in March 1972.

This is not to suggest, however, the emergence of a widespread public awareness of Japan’s wartime urban destruction. While there is no denying an upsurge in interest in and engagement with the air raids in some sectors of the Japanese public, media, and city governments, the central government has largely resisted focusing on the firebombing of Japan’s cities, and the Japanese public as a whole has little knowledge of this chapter of the long history of urban Japan. One telling example is the Ministry of Education’s barring of historian Ienaga Saburō’s textbook on account of his inclusion of photographs—including one related to the air raids—that, Ministry officials argued, contributed to a dark understanding of the war. ⁹¹ Equally revealing is the content of the Shōwa Memorial Hall (Shōwakan), the only museum built by the Japanese central government dedicated to remembering the civilian experience of the Asia-Pacific War. Although the exhibits there make countless references to the air raids, they include few photographs of the destruction wrought on Japanese cities and no images of civilians killed in the firebombings. ⁹²

And yet, however checkered the Japanese public’s engagement with these photos may be, Ishikawa’s photographs have become central to how the destruction of Tokyo is remembered in Japan. In the United States, by contrast, while Ishikawa’s photographs have been readily available since at least 1960, most English-language books about the bombing of Japan feature only aerial photographs in order to visually represent the targeting of Japan’s cities. For example, out of 57 figures featured in Kenneth P. Werrell’s 1996 Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan during World War II, just one image—a nighttime aerial photo of the city of Toyama ablaze on August 1, 1945—related to the firebombing of a Japanese city appears. ⁹³ Toyama serves as a representative of all Japanese cities, which were “severely battered by the B-29 bombardment.” ⁹⁴

Furthermore, when we focus on the few book-length publications that do include ground photographs of the firebombings, a number of issues arise. We find the earliest known instance of Ishikawa’s photographs appearing in English-language print meant for public consumption in 1960, when Ballantine Books published Martin Caidin’s A Torch to the Enemy. A $1.25 paperback, the book is exceptional both for being the first publication meant for a general audience to feature Ishikawa’s photographs (thirteen in all, which is by far the greatest among all English-language publications in print to date), and for actually painting a humanizing portrait of Japanese civilians as they experienced the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo. Caidin, however, incorrectly states Ishikawa’s position (claiming that he was the chief of police when he took the photographs) and errs in his claim that he is the first to publish such photographs in either the United States or Japan. While these matters may seem minor, when compiled with subsequent mistakes regarding the provenance of the photographs they serve to create a fog of confusion about Ishikawa and his photographic efforts.

Ishikawa’s photographs would not reappear in a U.S. publication for almost another three decades, when Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon was published in 1987. Sherry’s award-winning book contains three of Ishikawa’s photographs among twenty-four images that comprise what the author calls “Bombing in the American Imagination: A Visual Essay.” Given Sherry’s critical stance on what he deems a “technological fanaticism” that resulted in the firebombing of urban Japan, it is perhaps of no surprise that the author chooses to show some of the air raids’ ultimate effects to the human body. The grand sweep of his project also makes it understandable that the author makes a numbers of errors regarding Ishikawa’s photographs. While describing the images of civilians killed in the Tokyo air raid, he mistakenly states that the images show “victims of fire attacks on unidentified Japanese cities.” ⁹⁵ Additionally, he fails to credit Ishikawa as the photographer of these disturbing images, which Sherry has purposefully used as a counterpoint to his contention that aerial photographs created a “visual environment” that “rarely gave Americans a full appreciation of what their bombers did to Japan.” ⁹⁶

It was not until the publication of historian John Dower’s Cultures of War in 2010—sixty-five years after his Leica camera captured the images—that Ishikawa Kōyō would be correctly attributed in an English-language academic study of the incendiary air raids. ⁹⁷ While Dower fails to provide any discussion of the photograph in and of itself, he nonetheless breaks important ground. In addition to properly identifying the photographer, he intentionally places Ishikawa’s photograph next to an aerial photograph of Tokyo, which challenges the reader to simultaneously consider the differently scaled photographs. By displaying these two photographs side-by-side, Dower hints at new ways to looks at visual evidence related to the destruction of Japan’s cities.

Conclusion

In this article, we have set out to illustrate why excavation matters, why scale matters, and why paying attention to pictures of atrocity matters when examining visual evidence related to the intentional destruction of a city. We now close with a photographic juxtaposition that reinforces these points. The first photograph (Figure 6), taken in September 1945, is among the most reproduced by historians seeking to convey the damage caused by air raids to urban Japan. Easily obtainable from the U.S. National Archives, the photograph has a number of noteworthy aesthetic attributes. Whereas photographer Jonathan Swope lamented that Tokyo and other Japanese cities had been “bombed into nothingness” and therefore made a poor subject for his lens, this low-altitude, oblique aerial photograph includes a few features that interrupt the appearance of a flattened cityscape. ⁹⁸ Still standing ferro-concrete buildings break up an otherwise monotonous foreground, and a river and two canals separate the visible land into four segments, further disrupting the “nothingness” that Swope saw all around him.

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Figure 6.

A September 1945 aerial photograph of Tokyo.

As Davide Deriu claims, the aerial photograph of a destroyed cityscape such as this one may both possess a “memorial value” and allow the viewer to “visualize the full extent of mass devastation.” ⁹⁹ An archaeological approach to the photograph goes beyond a simple inclusion of the image as a visual representation of a destroyed Japanese city by considering, among other things, the precise location that has been captured, which in turn allows for the memorial value of the photograph to begin to be realized. The surest way to ascertain that this is indeed a photograph of Tokyo (rather than one of, say, Osaka, which also features a series of canals) is to recognize the distinctive circular structure to the top left of the image: the original Sumo Hall (Kokugikan). From there we can determine that the two large bridges spanning the Sumida River on either side of the image are the Ryōgoku Bridge to the left and Shin-Ōhashi (New Large Bridge) to the right. Just to the lower left of the Shin-Ōhashi is the 11.5-acre Hamachō Park, built following the catastrophic 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake and fire in order to serve as an evacuation area should another conflagration occur. The Tatekawa canal runs upward from the Sumida River in the top quarter of the frame. With these visual markers in place, we can conclude that we are looking down upon a portion of Nihonbashi (then a ward in and of itself, now a district of Chiyoda Ward) in the foreground, with Honjo Ward (now Sumida Ward) across the river on the top left and Fukagawa Ward (now Kōtō Ward) to the top right. When compared to another aerial photograph—one taken on November 7, 1944, by the Third Photo Reconnaissance Squadron and marked by the 949 Engineering Aviation Topographical Group with the four “aiming points” onto which 279 B-29 bombers dropped 1665 tons of incendiary weapons—it becomes clear that this area stood at the heart of “Target Zone 1” designated for destruction in March 1945. ¹⁰⁰ This image, showing but one part of the 16.7 square miles of Tokyo destroyed during the March 10, 1945, firebombing raid, lends credence to Deriu’s assertion that aerial photographs can provide a visual sense of destruction at the scale of the city and, therefore, is essential to consider.

However, because such photographs are unable to convey loss and destruction as it happened at the more intimate, lived scale of the neighborhood and the body, we contend that their memorial value can be more fully realized when they are considered in tandem with extant ground photographs, such as Figure 7. In the early afternoon of March 16, 1945, almost a week after the first major firebombing raid on Tokyo, Ishikawa Kōyō rode a motorcycle through a bracing cold wind to Rinnōji Temple (also called Ryōdaishi) adjacent to Ueno Park. Upon arriving, he took two photographs of around fifty people killed by asphyxiation and burns, then lined up along both sides of a road. Air raid survivors looked for missing family members by slowly passing the bodies, some of which had a nametag attached to clothing. Ishikawa then photographed police and laborers as they dug a series of mass graves for the unclaimed or unidentifiable bodies. ¹⁰¹ Importantly, Figure 7 reveals that the majority of dead are women, and that infants are among the casualties. As such, the image assumes tremendous memorial value by capturing and representing the portion of the civilian population most affected by the intentional destruction of the most densely populated area of the city. While aerial photographs can capture the destruction of an entire city (and be compared against later, post-reconstruction photographs in order to demonstrate the resilient nature of a city), their capacity to serve as visual evidence and assume memorial value is only most fully effectuated when they are considered alongside those more disturbing images of people whose lives are radically altered or cut short because of their inhabiting an “urban area” that has been included as a legitimate wartime target.

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Figure 7.

Ishikawa Ko–yo– photograph of Japanese civilians killed by the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo.

Perhaps the most significant implication of the foregoing analysis is that any consideration of the photography of urban destruction should work through a series of images that capture the many and various scales that constitute urban space. It is important to note, however, that such a “gestalt of scale” is also shaped by the “complex nature of sight”: the fact that our consumption of images is determined by neurobiology—how each viewer viscerally responds to an image—as much as by discourse and culture. ¹⁰² From individual bodies to entire cityscapes, a more kaleidoscopic visual portrait of the destruction of urban Japan provides for a more textured history, not simply of the events themselves but of the various and often conflicting ways they have been remembered and forgotten. By interweaving American images from above and Japanese images from below, therefore, it may be possible to go beyond some conventional descriptions of the Second World War that fail to raise important, if difficult, questions about the ultimate effects of targeting an enemy city for destruction.

Although there is of course no single approach to interpreting these images, photographic excavation does much to highlight the history of the image and the image of the history from which it emerged. To undertake such an excavation is to confront the latent potential of the photograph, which, dependent upon a confluence of circumstances, may acquire an immediate iconic status and lasting impact, or lay dormant only to later reshape how history is told and the past remembered. This is especially true of photography of urban destruction that occurred during World War II, which has only begun to be examined not simply as visual evidence but as a repository of its own far-reaching history of production, mediation, and memorialization.