The Strategic Bombing Survey and Local History

I found this story on a local historical exhibit in Utsunomiya, Japan awfully interesting:

“When I was growing up, I saw him working at home with an English-Japanese dictionary in his hand. I had wondered what my dad, who taught social studies in school, used the dictionary for.”

In fact, until he died in 2022 at age 87, Kazuya Yoneyama toiled at translating parts of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), a series of over 100 reports the U.S. military compiled in 1946-47 to assess the physical, economic and medical impact of its air raids, as well as aerial mining campaigns and atomic bombings on Japan.

Eighty-one years after Japan’s surrender in World War II, Yoneyama’s painstaking work is finally seeing the light of day.

Utsunomiya is currently holding an exhibition about postwar interviews the USSBS conducted with 61 residents of the city. The exhibits are based on Yoneyama’s files, which Narusawa donated to the city in March.

There’s a lot here, from issues about how local memory is displayed and preserved to how outside intervention can generate knowledge; much of this record would not exist at all were it not for the USAAF’s efforts to learn as much as possible about the effects of the bombing, a project it undertook largely for reasons of institutional self-interest.

Meanwhile, what particularly struck Otsuka the most were residents’ responses to the question about their feelings when they learned of Japan’s defeat.

A seamstress in her 40s broke down and cried in front of interviewers as she recounted her shock of learning the news, while a male factory employee in his 50s expressed great disappointment, wondering why the nation’s leaders didn’t stop the war earlier if they were to surrender in the end.

“An overwhelming majority said that, contrary to what I had imagined, they felt disappointed, flustered, saddened, stunned — that they were shocked,” Otsuka said.

“This finding surprised me. In historical dramas about this period, people who heard the radio broadcast announcing that the war was over are often depicted as feeling relieved. Instead, almost all of the respondents said they experienced psychological shock. That shows just how deeply they had been indoctrinated to support the war effort.”

The bombing was horrific and the Strategic Bombing Survey was invasive and coercive… and yet locals have managed to turn it into a means of better understanding their own history. The last finding is particularly interesting; the memory of war seems to rapidly diverge from reality when people have good political and psychological reasons to revise their own understandings. British memories of World War I collected in the 1950s differed mightily from accounts at the time and in the immediate aftermath. I suspect that something like this will happen here in the wake of the national trauma that we call Trump, although I suppose that requires the trauma to end at some point…