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By Root 1091 0

incendiary fires. Houses were made of wood and paper and tightly packed together; efforts to cut fire lanes between them had foundered on labor shortages that had left in place the wooden remnants of structures that had been demolished. Police, firefighters, and hospital workers were unable to cope with the scope of the disaster they faced. ‘To fight ultramodern incendiary bombs’, wrote Robert Guillain, a French journalist who was in Tokyo during the attack, ‘the populace’s basic weapons were straw mats soaked in water, little paper sacks of sand and, in quantity, water buckets that had to be filled from the cisterns at each house’. Families had been told that, in case of an attack, they were to protect their homes and avoid panic.21

Mostly, people ran. They wrapped themselves in hooded air-raid cloaks, thickly padded with cotton, gathered together what family they could, and ran, hoping to find a way out of the flames, certain that they would not survive if they stood still. Whipped by a strong wind, the akakaze or ‘red wind’ off the Tokyo plain, the flames ignited the cloaks and trapped their wearers. Water was their hope. Firefighters tried to douse running people with water, hoping it would protect them from the blaze, or people threw themselves into barrels of water that the parsimonious had placed by their houses to fight fires. People ran to fetid canals and immersed themselves, with only their mouths and noses above the water line. But many of them died anyway, gulping at the deoxygenated air, trampled by others frantically seeking relief from the fires, or boiled by the superheated shallow water in which they stood. Others made it to the Sumida River, only to be swept away by the swift current or drowned as the tide rose: fire or water, they chose their fate. Some ran up rises toward bridges, only to find that the bridge they sought had collapsed, and only then to be crushed or pushed into the water by the crowd that had followed them up the fruitless approach. Or they made it onto an undamaged steel bridge, placed their hands in relief on its railing—and twisted off in agony as they were burned by the scorching metal. The Buddhist temple to Kwan-yin, survivor of the great earthquake and fire of 1923, burned with its monks and refugees and its famous tall gingko trees. In the red light district of Yoshiwara men died with their prostitutes; residents of Nihombashi, funneled by police to the imposing Meiji Theater, tried to protect themselves from the flames by lowering the great steel stage curtain, only to suffocate when toxic fumes penetrated the curtain, which had stuck in place.

As the dawn came in Tokyo, survivors of the bombing were caught in a paralysis of wonder, shock, and nausea. The city stank with the ‘sickeningly sweet odor’ of melted, rotting flesh. A reporter found ‘long lines of ragged, ash-covered people struggling] along, dazed and silent, like columns of ants’. Nearly everyone remarked on the astonishing quiet of the eastern part of the city, the silence broken only by the sound of people coughing or calling out to loved ones. Dedicated as they were, policemen, doctors, and civic officials quailed at the task of collecting the dead. ‘In the black Sumida River countless bodies were floating, clothed bodies, naked bodies, all as black as charcoal. It was unreal,’ recounted Dr Kuboto Shigenori. ‘These were all dead people, but you couldn’t tell whether they were men or women. You couldn’t even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood.’ A police official explained that he was told to report on the situation in the city. ‘Most of us’, he said, ‘were unable to do this because of horrifying conditions beyond imagination ...I was supposed to investigate, but I didn’t go because I did not like to see the terrible sights.’ (His interviewer noted that at this he laughed, uncomfortably.) Many of those who survived the attack felt guilty and apologetic, no matter how badly wounded they were or how much they had lost. Michael Sherry has noted that Tokyoites did not give any