Elderly survivors fight to preserve memory of Tokyo firebombing in 'Paper City'

Sometimes you think you know a place, only to realize you really don’t know it at all. Australian filmmaker Adrian Francis had lived in Tokyo for several years before he even caught wind of one of the most devastating episodes in the capital’s past.

On the night of March 9, 1945, an armada of U.S. B-29 bombers flew over the city at a low altitude, dropping 1,665 tons of incendiaries. A metropolis built mostly from wood and paper was transformed into an inferno. In the space of a few hours, an estimated 100,000 people died, while over a million were left homeless.

It was a staggering loss of life, yet you’d struggle to find many reminders of the event today. The cremated remains of the air raid’s victims were enshrined at a memorial hall in Yokoamicho Park near Ryogoku, originally built to commemorate the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Nearby stands a small peace monument, unveiled in 2001, but there is no dedicated public memorial similar to the ones for victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Even kids in Tokyo go to Hiroshima to learn about the war, in a great irony ... even though they live where the most destructive air raid in history happened,” Francis says.

The 48-year-old first learned about the firebombing from “The Fog of War,” Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary about former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Then, as now, he was struck by how little the city appeared to have done to commemorate this dark chapter in its history: “It seemed like a willful denial of something that happened right here, to the country's own civilians.”

Tokyo wasn’t alone in suffering such a fate. The firebombing tactics used on that fateful night were subsequently repeated across more than 60 other Japanese cities. But while the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has become woven into the national narrative, these other wartime air raids are treated with something more akin to collective amnesia.

Francis explores this disconnect in a new documentary, “Paper City,” which follows the efforts of a handful of elderly survivors to ensure that a proper legacy of the Tokyo firebombing remains. One of them, Hiroshi Hoshino, was instrumental in getting the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to create an official register of air raid victims. Another, Minoru Tsukiyama, spearheaded efforts to compile a complete list of victims from the district where he lived in Morishita, Koto Ward — the only neighborhood to have made such a comprehensive record. As Francis notes, “Everything we know, really, has come from those citizens' attempts to preserve it.”

“Paper City” plays on the contrast between the horrific reminiscences of survivors — rivers full of corpses, people asphyxiated in bomb shelters — and the innocuous face of modern Tokyo, evocatively shot by cinematographer Brett Ludeman. When the film’s subjects visit locations that feature prominently in their accounts, Francis says, “We're there with them, and we're inside their memories, but the outside world is completely oblivious.”

This is brought home when Hoshino goes to a park in Kinshicho, east Tokyo, where a children’s play area now stands on what was once a mass grave for 13,000 bodies. As he observes, there’s nothing at the site to indicate its grim history. “I think that disconnect between private and public memory was always one of the ideas that we wanted to explore,” Francis says.

Much of the footage in the film was shot around the 70th anniversary of the firebombing in 2015, which survivors realized might be their last chance to secure some kind of redress. (A lawsuit brought against the government in 2007, seeking an apology and compensation, ultimately proved unsuccessful.) Their campaign took place as then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was pushing to expand the role of the country’s Self-Defense Forces. Francis notes that the Japanese public is now “being kind of groomed for future wars against Russia or China.”

“The thing that struck me most through making this is ... the extent to which peacemaking is actual work,” he says.

The political debates in the film have been hashed out since the 1990s, when a group led by revisionist historian Nobukatsu Fujioka derailed moves to create a Tokyo Peace Museum. Fujioka’s disciples make a brief appearance in “Paper City,” when ultra-nationalist uyoku are seen taunting survivors as they prepare to present a petition to Diet lawmakers. It isn’t a good look.

One scene that didn’t make the final cut — for narrative rather than political reasons — was a meeting between Tokyo survivors and their counterparts from Chongqing, China. The city was subjected to relentless aerial bombardment by Japanese forces between 1938 and 1943 (another fact the revisionists would rather people forget).

“It was pretty amazing because they were expressing solidarity with each other as victims — on opposite sides — of aggression against civilians,” Francis recalls. “And they both saw themselves as victims of Japanese militarism, as well.”

The first-time feature director didn’t set out to make a documentary about the firebombing. He had originally conceived what he describes as a “symphony film ... a portrait of Tokyo, through different characters,” one of whom might be an air raid survivor. In 2010, he presented his concept at a workshop held as part of the Berlin International Film Festival’s talent development program, and “the advice I got was: This is a little too unfocused.”

When he returned to Tokyo, a harsh reality check brought things into relief. He broke up with his long-term partner — a Japanese man he’d met in Sydney over a decade earlier — and they both lost their fathers to cancer, all within a six-month period.

“After the breakup and my father dying, I was thinking a lot about ... things like legacy and what we leave behind,” Francis says. “I think that probably pushed me toward the idea of these survivors working to leave behind this memory.”

He mentions that he’s been open about his sexuality during recent interviews with Japanese media “and they never print it” — perhaps out of concern that it would distract from an already contentious theme. It’s hard to miss the parallels with “Paper City” itself.

“I've been thinking a lot about this since I finished it,” he agrees. “The film's about erasure, or memory and forgetting — all these kinds of things — and, you know, that's definitely something I can relate to.”

“Paper City” is currently playing with English subtitles at Image Forum in Tokyo, with further screenings scheduled in Osaka, Ueda and Nagoya. For more information, visit papercityfilm.com.