The Need to Narrate the Tokyo Air Raids

With over 150 major works and countless other news and journal articles on the subject, Tokyo writer Saotome Katsumoto (b. 1932) is the most prolific author of the World War Two Tokyo air raids.¹ The sheer volume of his writing attests to the overwhelming nature of the raids for him – attacks that he narrowly survived when he was just twelve years old. Saotome began writing about the Tokyo raids with his 1952 novel My Hometown, Shitamachi (Shitamachi no kōkyo) and he has since been a central figure in the decades-long citizens’ movement to preserve memories of the attacks. In 1970, he helped lead an ambitious project to compile and record survivor accounts of the bombings (Saotome 2015). In addition, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he headed a movement to construct a peace memorial museum in Tokyo to commemorate the air raids; when these museum efforts ultimately resulted in failure, he opened a small resource facility, the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damages, in Tokyo's Kōtō Ward in 2002.² Each of these activities demonstrates an emphasis on passing on survivor accounts of the air raids, and the idea that the raids must be narrated.