「Japan Air Raids.org」へようこそ。 （日本語）

Welcome to JapanAirRaids.org, a digital archive dedicated to the dissemination of information and research about the air raids conducted by the United States Army Air Forces and Navy against Japan.

In Japan it took over twenty years following the end of World War II before people began to make a concerted effort to remember the incendiary raids that destroyed a significant percentage of most of Japan’s cities, wiped out a quarter of all housing in the country, made nine million people homeless, killed at least 187,000 civilians, and injured 214,000 more. Thanks to the Japanese citizens who labored to write survivor accounts, locate and preserve related documents, and analyze the destruction of urban Japan (and the concurrent suffering and social upheaval that occurred), the history of the air raids has taken root in Japan in a variety of ways. Numerous books and articles have been published, resource centers and peace museums have been built, and important research continues to be carried out.

Outside of Japan, the lag time to look closely at the impacts of the air raids is even more pronounced. In 1977, historian Gordon Daniels lamented the fact that academics had largely ignored the air raids on Japan – and the so-called Great Tokyo Air Raid in particular – as a subject of inquiry. While a handful of important English-language books and articles have appeared since then, most deal with the topic from the standpoint of U.S. strategic bombing doctrines and campaigns. Save for the limited research hosted on this website, analyses about what the air raids entailed for Japanese civilians and the cities in which they lived have yet to be written.

We hope that further inquiry will be fostered by this digital archive, which includes public domain primary and secondary source documents, air raid survivor accounts, and analyses of the U.S. firebombing campaign against urban Japan.