Long before Hollywood and “Oppenheimer” canonized the claim, Kyoto embraced the identity of a city spared from the ravages of World War II.
In the 2023 movie, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson casually removes the ancient capital from a list of potential targets for the atomic bomb, claiming he and his wife honeymooned there years previously. More probable is that Stimson was persuaded by dinner conversation with his cousin Henry Loomis, who emphasized Kyoto’s numerous artistic and architectural treasures that he had learned of while studying Japanese history at Harvard. Loomis was perhaps under the tutelage of Japan specialist Langdon Warner, who was also credited as the savior of Nara and Kyoto and who, despite his protestations, is now enshrined in statuary in front of Nara's Horyuji Temple and Kamakura Station.
Yet Kyoto was not completely unaffected by the air raids that devastated much of the rest of the country. During the first half of 1945, the city was indiscriminately bombed five times, resulting in 302 deaths and 563 injuries. Due to press censorship at the time, documentation is scarce, but the initial raid on the Umamachi neighborhood in the city’s Higashiyama Ward appears to have left 36 dead and destroyed more than 140 houses. Today, a small monument stands in a schoolyard adjacent to the Four Seasons Kyoto.
The Mitsubishi factory near the current Toei Uzumasa film studios was hit by an air raid in April, and a month later the Kyoto Imperial Palace itself took machine gun fire from passing planes (damage was minor as its grounds had long been cleared of structures in order to create a firebreak and evacuation ground).
The final June air raid, centered on the Nishijin neighborhood, was the most severe, leaving 50 dead and 292 houses damaged. Fragments of the bombs dropped are on display at Yamanaka Abura-ten, an attractive machiya (traditional townhouse) that has been selling oil for nearly 200 years.
After June, air raids on Kyoto were halted as the city was in consideration to be targeted by the atomic bomb, with the tourist favorite Umekoji Locomotive Depot (the present-day Kyoto Railway Museum) as the epicenter. Yet the city was never seen as having much strategic industrial or military value, and those targets were few.
Visitors to Fushimi Inari Shrine can ditch the vermilion labyrinth and instead follow the adjacent hiking paths south to the Fukukusa area, today a quiet neighborhood of colleges and nondescript imperial tombs. During the war years, this area was a military town, and the current main building of the Kyoto Seibo Gakuin school was constructed in 1908 as the headquarters of the 16th Army Division, formed after the Russo-Japanese War but annihilated in 1944 in defense of Leyte Island in the Philippines.
Roads in Fukukasa still retain names such as “Division Highway,” “First Military Road,” “Second Military Road,” and “Third Military Road,” and the Division Bridge over the Lake Biwa Canal bears the army's five-pointed star. And just steps from Fujinomori Station, a public sento bath by the name of “Gunjin-yu” (“Soldiers’ Bath”) still hints at its former purpose.
But Kyoto’s most powerful wartime monument, Ryozen Kannon Temple, lies almost out of sight until the visitor is nearly upon it. The 24-meter high statue at the center of this temple to the north of Kiyomizu Temple was built in 1955 as a memorial to Japan’s war dead and houses memorial tablets of the 2 million Japanese who perished during the fighting. Four times a day, a memorial service is held for the repose of souls of soldiers from all sides who died in the war.
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