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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Place Annihilation

That Japanese cities were bombed into nothingness was a common refrain of the immediate postwar period. Although countless observers lamented the difficulty of faithfully describing the nature of these urban ruinscapes, many attempted to convey the totality of destruction. “Tokio [sic] is twisted, torn and gutted,” wrote Deton Brooks, one of the first American journalists to survey the capital in 1945. “Buildings and landmarks have disintegrated into a sea of blasted wreckage. In their place hangs a deathlike pall. It seemed as if we were visiting a ghost city.” To travel through one of Japan’s dozens of ghost cities was to behold a panorama of seemingly unqualified destruction. Whereas by late 1945 German cities had been dubbed “rubble capitals” (Reichstrümmerstadt), urban Japan was described simply as horizons of “torched fields” (yakenohara).

Yet while the scope of destruction surely necessitated a new vocabulary of ruination, such commentary belies a geo-spatial logic that shaped the strategic bombing of urban Japan from its outset. Indeed, etched into this “scorched earth” lay particular patterns of urban erasure and social vulnerability that informed the bombing of Japan at every stage of the planning and prosecution of these raids. In other words, contrary to the notion that the firebombing of urban Japan was indiscriminate, it adhered to a social geography of bomb destruction that disproportionately targeted vulnerable working class neighborhoods of the city.

This module attempts to excavate this social geography from Tokyo's ruinscapes using two different types of sources. First, it turns to the diary of Ishikawa Kōyō—a Tokyo Metropolitan Police photographer who witnessed the firebombing firsthand—to elucidate the ground level experience of the raid. It pays particular attention to Ishikawa's diary entries for the evening of March 9-10, 1945, translations of which can be read here. Second, it draws upon a range of documents produced by the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) to plan and prosecute the firebombing of urban Japan, a campaign that laid waste to large portions of 66 different Japanese cities. Considered together, these sources enable us to examine the process through which American war planners and bombardiers set their sights on Tokyo’s Shitamachi: the capital’s “low city”—plebian flatlands that were, as Ken Hewitt puts it, "socially, not just topographically, low" (Hewitt 2009, 364).

In keeping with the goal of reading the bombardier's view against that of the civilian below, this module is comprised of two principal pathways. For a look at the militarized vision of the USAAF and its representations of Tokyo continue on to the next pathway. For an analysis of how Ishikawa and his photographs captured the ground level experience click here.

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Conclusion: The Next Frontier
Imperial Japan saw the air as the next frontier of expansion, or as succinctly summarized by this Manchuria Aviation Company advertisement, to "Conquer Big Sky!" The corporate magazine ManAir reflected this ideology of spatial dominance by technological advancement, with its covers featuring images of complex machinery and geopolitical emblems. The traveling woman and the militarized child also emerged as symbolic figures of the aerial modern.
The advent of the airplane generated new spaces of collaboration and contestation in the twentieth century, one that challenged the terrestrial boundaries of imperial and national states. Through the Manchuria Aviation Company, Japan sought alliances with Germany and Italy, as well as rivalries with the United States and the Soviet Union, at the expense of Chinese and Mongol sovereignty on the ground.
In bringing the land increasingly under an ocular occupation, the aerial perspective produced compelling spatial and temporal representations of Inner Asia. The view from above held a revelatory power of instantaneous knowledge, leading those involved in the enterprise to believe that they had achieved a most powerful convergence between sight and knowledge for the empire to date. Certainly, the halting advance of the Manchuria Aviation Company demonstrated the possible extent of reconnaissance from the sky, where thousands of aerial photographs might point to a panoptic fixation of imperial Japan. Mapping and measuring the terrain, plotting points to coordinates on a putatively universal grid, these pursuits meant another level of scientific entrenchment where the land could not escape the purview of trigonometric calculation. And yet, these photographs themselves sit in archives as forgotten 'moments' and collect dust.
Nevertheless, their tangible legacies remain. Monuments to colonial development built upon felled forests and barren earth stand as an enduring, though ambivalent testament to the technological imaginary, the realm of possibility for empire opened up by the view from above. By war's end, as the modules by David Fedman and Michitake Aso demonstrate, the view from above took on new significance throughout Asia, from incendiary bombs in China and Japan to biological warfare in Korea and Vietnam. It was a different, far more destructive meaning.
Invasions in the Sinosphere
During the Cold War, what was a biological invasion and how it would happen were questions that caused anxiety and fear. This type of warfare involved the intentional use of microbes, and the living and non-living vectors that carry them, to weaken or kill humans considered enemies. In the context of total war, biological warfare was also directed at the animals and plants that helped sustain those people. And by ending stories, biological warfare could, no less than the firebombing of Tokyo analyzed by David Fedman, annihilate place.
The fear of invasion has been explored in the US context but less so for other societies, especially in the “Third World,” which was the site of so many types of invasions. Traditional understandings of invasions, or unwanted border crossings, in Vietnamese society have revolved around humans including Mongols, Chinese, and French armies. But biological warfare techniques developed in the twentieth century meant that non-human nature, and the environment itself, could become an invasive threat. Việt Minh medical doctors and cadre became concerned about insidious invasions that would go undetected until after it was too late to resist them and they had to grapple with several questions:
What were the geographies of invasion? At what scale could they happen? What would an invasion look like? How could an invasion be differentiated from “natural” processes? Who, and what, would invade? How, in short, could invasions be mapped? And then, perhaps most importantly, how could these invasions be stopped?
In order to start to answer these questions, the Việt Minh drew on, and modified, existing spatial imaginaries. After 1949 and the victory of the communists in China, Việt Minh leaders envisioned Vietnam rejoining a recreated Sinosphere world, this time linked not by Confucian culture but by communist party rule. In this Sinosphere world, a newly established PRC was at the center (though peripheral to the Soviet Union), with parts of Vietnam and Korea joined to this world. By the early 1950s, Japan and South Korea were under US control, and thus out of the communist Sinosphere. Not surprisingly, the Việt Minh turned to Chinese investigations in order to better understand potential biological warfare in Northern Vietnam. In addition to Vietnamese medical doctors and students traveling to China for study, the PRC held a conference in Beijing to present the evidence of US biological warfare in North Korea and Northeast China.
If you are unfamiliar with the historical geographies of East and Southeast Asia, you may wish to explore a side path on cartographic maps of Northern Vietnam. Otherwise, you can continue on the main path about biological warfare during the Korean War.
A History of American Biological Warfare
The images in the gallery above, also from the Việt Minh pamphlet, depict well-known aspects of the American biological weapons program. Jacob Hamblin's Arming Mother Nature recounts the history of American and British interest in environmental modification and the role biological, chemical, and radiological weapons played in the arsenals of these countries' militaries. As Hamblin shows, by the early 1940s high-level US officials were keenly interested in biological weapons but were unsure of how they would be used in warfare. At the end of World War II, the US government had access to the captured documents of both the German and Japanese biological warfare programs. The Vietnamese pamphlet assumes a close collaboration between fellow imperialist nations, even if the United States and Germany and Japan had only just been at war. The natural result of this collaboration was the continued use of biological weapons over North Korea during the Korean War.
As image four in the gallery above suggests, airplanes were key vectors for biological weapons. Airplanes and microbes resulted in compounding mobilities—mobilities whose velocity and outcomes were augmented, unpredictable, and threatening. In French Indochina, airplanes were a source of mobility, and terror and they were used for example to map as well as to rain bombs down on those protesting colonial injustice. During the 1940s, airplanes in Asia were vectors that transported deadly bombs as well as potentially deadly microbes. During the First Indochina War, the French used US airplanes, a sign of the absent American empire. Moreover, an American air company called the Civil Air Transport (CAT), later renamed Air America, ran supplies for the French. Although leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam initially hoped to develop their own air force, they never succeeded and eventually focused their energy on anti-aircraft techniques.

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