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• 1 2020-04-30T18:05:24-04:00 Capital Punishment 11 The burning of Tokyo in American war planning and wartime popular culture. plain 2021-06-16T14:53:35-04:00 35.6833, 139.7833 Tōkyō 1923-1942 David Fedman Baker, Don Doolittle Raiders

  No sooner had the smoke cleared over Pearl Harbor than Americans war planners began to systematically investigate how best to burn Tokyo and its environs to the ground. While some intelligence agencies began to plot out specific sites of industry and defense around the enemy capital for surgical bombardment, others quickly turned their attention to urban Tokyo’s well-known vulnerability to fire. That much of eastern Tokyo had burned to the ground following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 was of great interest to military planners, who began to investigate how they might spark a great conflagration of their own (Fedman and Karacas, 2012).

  Such an abiding interest in Tokyo’s flammability was far from confined to the war room. Americans of all stripes were soon imagining the capital aflame, especially following news of the Doolittle Raiders' sensational 1942 assault on Tokyo. Perhaps the most popular expression of this sentiment can be found in the chorus of Don Baker’s 1942 hit There’ll be a little Smokio in Tokio:

  There'll be a little smokio in Tokio
  Hooray, hooray, hooray
  And you can bet it will not be from Tokio
  Hooray, hooray, hooray
  Them saki yaki boy
  Will throw away his toys
  And Uncle Sam will frown
  When Yankee Doodle goes to town