Downtown Tokyo around 6 months after the air raids (September 1945, photographed by the US military). The original black-and-white image has been colorized using AI and historical sources.
In the early hours of March 10, 1945, around 300 American B-29 bombers struck Tokyo's downtown districts in a coordinated assault. The hardest-hit areas included what are now Taito and Sumida wards. The raid, which came to be known as the Tokyo Firebombing, killed more than 100,000 people in a single night — the deadliest air raid in history.
The photograph above was taken that September, shortly after the end of the Pacific War, when the United States military documented the destruction in an aerial survey over what is now JR Ryogoku Station, looking toward Tokyo Bay.
A Densely Packed City
The mass killing of civilians had been planned from the outset. At the time, this part of Tokyo was one of the most densely populated places on earth — home to roughly 35,000 people per square kilometer (about 90,000 per sq mile), more than twice today's density. The streets were lined with wooden houses, offering little resistance to fire.
American planners had studied historical disasters such as the Fires of Edo and the Great Kanto Earthquake. They even built model Japanese neighborhoods to test how quickly flames would spread.
Deadly Firestorms
Then came the strong northwesterly winds typical of early spring. They fed the flames until they became firestorms — churning columns of fire like tornadoes. Shortly after 2 AM, wind speeds reached 25 meters per second (around 56 miles per hour), the strength of a typhoon. In a single night, 270,000 homes burned to the ground, and more than a million people lost the neighborhoods they had lived in.
The US military had reportedly anticipated the seasonal winds. But what unfolded that night far exceeded anything their planners had calculated on paper.
By comparison, the bombing of Dresden, the largest air raid on the European front, killed about 25,000 people. Nazi gas chambers killed as many as 6,000 people in a single day. Across Japan, air raids claimed more than 500,000 lives in total, including the tens of thousands who died instantly when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Wars still rage in many parts of the world today. What we must not forget is that human beings are capable of such cruelty.
Across the Scorched Earth
On the right side of the old photograph taken by the US military, the Sumida River winds through the frame. Just months before the photo was taken, the river, along with the canal at the center, had been filled with the bodies of those burned to death.
The houses visible in the foreground survived because the buildings around them had been deliberately torn down, creating firebreaks that protected facilities such as medical centers.
The circular structure is the former Ryogoku Kokugikan, the sumo arena. The Emperor's Cup, still awarded today, is said to have been saved by wrestlers who stood guard over it as the flames raged around them.
Look closely at the streets below and you can make out people moving through them. They are the Japanese of 80 years ago, taking their first steps across scorched earth. One can only wonder what the American soldier behind the camera was thinking as he looked down at the shimmering Sumida River and the people living around it.
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Author: The Sankei Shimbun
