The Asia-Pacific War in a Thousand-Year History

The devastation of the Japanese homeland towards the end of the Asia-Pacific War under Allied bombing has left a range of war museums, memorials and heritage sites across the nation. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum are the most well-known examples, with the former holding UNESCO World Heritage status, while the Peace Osaka museum and the Center for the Tokyo Raids and War Damages address the horrors of indiscriminate incendiary bombing. Many other museums and archives, both publicly and privately managed, can be found in major cities where air raids ravaged much of the pre-war architecture.

In contrast, Kyoto's international prestige is founded on its extensive pre-industrial heritage sites dating as far back as the 8th century. The recent movie Oppenheimer (2023) reiterated a pervasive myth that US Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed the city as the primary testing ground for the atomic bomb because he had previously honeymooned there with his wife (cf. Reischauer 1986). While this rationale for Kyoto's removal has since been disputed by historians (Kelly 2012), the decision nonetheless contributed to a heritage discourse of Kyoto as a hisensai-toshi (非戦災都市), a "City Untouched by War" (Nishikawa 2017). This status, combined with the emphasis on pre-modern heritage, has left a historical blindspot regarding how the Asia-Pacific War impacted citizens living in the old capital. Through diary entries translated in Samuel Hideo Yamashita's Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies (2007), we gain insight into daily life for Japanese in the city towards the end of the Asia-Pacific War unreflected in Kyoto's heritage landscape today.

Wartime Life in the City Untouched by War

While Kyoto avoided the mass destruction seen in heavily bombed cities across Japan, life was far from easy for those living in the city during wartime. The diary of Tamura Tsunejirō (田村常次郎) vividly demonstrates that safety from bombing was little comfort when living through total war. In his 70s at the outbreak of war, he was spared conscription yet had to endure many challenges of supporting family and state in the latter years of the conflict. Such struggles included illness from malnutrition and pneumonia, which were exacerbated by food and textile rationing, distress about grandchildren being sent to work in industrial centres targetted by air raids, and admonishment from oppressive authorities.

Note from the author: While Tamura's diary provides a rare firsthand account of life in the last years of imperial Kyoto, Tamura's perspective is that of a Japanese businessman in the imperial homeland. Kyoto was also home to peoples mobilised from across the empire to serve its interests, including a large Korean community subjected to racial discrimination and forced labour whose perspective is marginalised in the historical record (De Antoni 2019). For more on mobilised imperial subjects in Japan, see the Kyoto Museum for World Peace.

Tamura also wrote of the constant fear of bombing as tales of horrific destruction reached him from Nagoya, Osaka and Tokyo. The entry below, however, records the day the bombings reached Kyoto.

Contrary to the hisensai-toshi myth, Kyoto in fact suffered three air raids in 1945. Using testimony from survivors, the next section describes the attacks in detail.