Sometimes you think you know a place, only to realize you really don¡¯t know it at all. Australian filmmaker Adrian Francis had lived in Tokyo for several years before he even caught wind of one of the most devastating episodes in the capital¡¯s past.
On the night of March 9, 1945, an armada of U.S. B-29 bombers flew over the city at a low altitude, dropping 1,665 tons of incendiaries. A metropolis built mostly from wood and paper was transformed into an inferno. In the space of a few hours, an estimated 100,000 people died, while over a million were left homeless.
It was a staggering loss of life, yet you¡¯d struggle to find many reminders of the event today. The cremated remains of the air raid¡¯s victims were enshrined at a memorial hall in Yokoamicho Park near Ryogoku, originally built to commemorate the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Nearby stands a small peace monument, unveiled in 2001, but there is no dedicated public memorial similar to the ones for victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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