Paper City
Adrian Francis (Director)
Feather Films: 2021
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Shortly after midnight on 10 March 1945, with air raid sirens blaring outside, fourteen-year-old Hiroshi Hoshino was woken by his mother in their Tokyo home. ‘When I opened the shutters, the whole sky was red,’ he recalls. ‘Whichever way you went, you’d hit a wall of fire.’ A fleet of United States B-29 bombers had launched an incendiary raid on the Japanese capital, targeting a densely populated residential area packed with wooden homes. Fuelled by fierce winds, the napalm bombs ignited roiling firestorms so intense they sucked the oxygen out of the air and engulfed entire neighbourhoods in flame.

In only a few hours, an estimated 100,000 people were killed and almost forty-one square kilometres of eastern Tokyo was decimated. Bodies choked rivers and canals where people had desperately sought sanctuary from the inferno, as sparks, embers and debris rained down. Photographs taken in the direct aftermath by Koyo Ishikawa, of the Tokyo police department, show corpses burned beyond recognition and apocalyptic ruins. Ishikawa, who only narrowly escaped death himself, later described seeing the fires reflected on the silver fuselages of the low-flying planes. While the US moved on to firebomb dozens of other Japanese cities across the country, the 10 March raid on Tokyo stands out for its singular destructiveness.

• Tags: Adrian Francis, David Hopkins, Hiroshi Hoshino, Issue 26, Japan