With veined and creased hands, frail yet steady, Tetsuzo Shiraishi leans across the table to offer a copy of an illustration he created specifically for this interview. It depicts a towering tree, its branches adorned with handwritten notes recounting personal and societal events from his 87-year life.
Episodes from his youth are inscribed near the base of the trunk, while higher up, where the tree narrows with age, more recent developments appear, reaching ever closer to the sky.
“You see, the tree emerges from the ground in August 1945, by which time I was 7 years and 10 months old,” he says on a scorching Saturday in July, seated in an air-conditioned room cluttered with stacks of books and paper at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage in the capital’s Koto Ward. “That’s when the war ended.”
The privately run facility is dedicated to the so-called Great Tokyo Air Raid by U.S. forces that took place on the night of March 9, 1945, and into the early hours of March 10. It comprised a massive low-altitude bombing run over the working-class shitamachi neighborhoods of eastern Tokyo, via the deployment of a large formation of B-29 bombers. In just 2½ hours, 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs set 41 square kilometers ablaze. The attack killed about 100,000 people, destroyed 270,000 homes and left more than 1 million displaced.
“As I was escaping, I saw someone right in front of me — I think it was a woman — suddenly engulfed in flames, collapsing and consumed by fire,” says Shiraishi, small-framed but sprightly for his age.
In addition to that fateful night, air raids of 1944 and 1945 devastated a city already scarred by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Shiraishi and his family somehow survived the most catastrophic aerial bombardment in history, though their home was destroyed and all their possessions were lost.
In the years that followed, Japan’s capital would rise again from rubble, eventually transforming into the world’s largest metropolis — a chaotic mesh of gleaming high-rises and timeworn alleys, all coexisting in uneasy harmony.
Shiraishi’s life has unfolded alongside Tokyo’s own postwar journey. Black markets thrived under American occupation, and surging demand for military-related goods and services from the Korean and Vietnam wars fueled Japan’s rapid recovery. Western entertainment gained a foothold, color television arrived and the Tokyo Olympics marked the debut of the shinkansen — all while rural migrants continued to pour into the capital.
The city’s evolution hasn’t been without setbacks, however. The asset-price bubble burst in the early 1990s, plunging the nation into decades of economic stagnation. More recently, a persistently low birthrate has led to a chronic labor shortage as the population continues to gray and shrink, while Japan itself must contend with the pressures of a shifting geopolitical order.
“Have we come far in the past 80 years?” Shiraishi asks, his gaze drifting into the distance. “I suppose so. But I don’t think we’ve become that wealthy.” He looks back, steadier now. “Salarymen are still surviving on low wages, and inflation is high. After all these years, that sense of hardship still lingers.”
The bombs fell in waves
On the evening of March 9, 1945, Shiraishi was at home in Ryusen, Taito Ward, as temperatures dropped and strong winds swept the city. With air raids a constant threat, his family slept with emergency backpacks by their pillows.
The attack began around 10:30 p.m. Flames from the nearby Yoshiwara red-light district were already visible when Shiraishi’s mother, tough-minded and quick on her feet, hastily organized the family of seven into four groups and sent them off into the night. Shiraishi was paired with his older sister, and the two ran north, away from the encroaching fire.
As they fled, the night sky filled with B-29s. Bombs fell in waves. The streets were clogged with evacuees. Streetcars burned with passengers trapped inside. His sister led him toward the Minowa tram depot, which was briefly a safe haven until bombs struck its roof. Forced to run again, they followed the Toden Arakawa Line tracks and eventually found refuge in a large, open field near the banks of the Sumida River at a sewage treatment plant. There, they collapsed among a crowd of survivors, watching the city burn to the south.
In the morning, an acquaintance of their father recognized them and brought them to safety, offering the hungry children large rice balls at his home near Arakawa Police Station. The man soon located their father, who had evacuated alone, and, reunited, the three returned to the ruins of their home in Ryusen, where they found their mother and eldest sister. The family took temporary refuge with an aunt near Omori Beach, 18 kilometers to the south. Four days later, the remaining two sisters were discovered.
“Our entire family of seven had survived, which was an extraordinary outcome amid widespread loss,” Shiraishi says.
Their ordeal wasn’t over, though. On April 14, another air raid destroyed their aunt’s home. The family moved again, this time to an empty house in Magome in the capital’s southern Ota Ward. Just days later, on May 25, that neighborhood was also bombed — Shiraishi’s third air raid. Though their house was spared, the nearby elementary school where he was set to transfer was badly damaged.
When the war finally ended that summer, now 80 years ago, Shiraishi’s life — as depicted in his illustration of the tree — began to grow out of the ashes of total devastation.
Cabarets and nightclubs
In the years that followed, life in Tokyo resumed amid the ruins. Shiraishi returned to school and eventually entered the Nihon University College of Art, majoring in cinema. His father's business failed, however, and he was unable to pay tuition. He was expelled.
“In the 1950s, a massive wave of American culture flooded into Japan,” he says. “Hollywood films, gambling. ... Besides horse racing, now there was also motorboat and bicycle racing.”
Shiraishi gravitated to the world of show business and began working at one of the many cabarets springing up across Tokyo. A man of many hats, he helped produce strip shows, managed lighting and regularly visited a variety of nightclubs — including the storied Copacabana in Akasaka, where Dewi Sukarno (born Naoko Nemoto), a young Japanese hostess, met Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia, and later became one of his wives.
“Back then, there were nightclubs and cabarets, part-time and regular salons,” he recalls. “Salons were places where women entertained customers. Nightclubs were large-scale venues with their own revue troupes, where top-tier performers and first-class bands played — there were about 10 of those in Akasaka and Ginza. I joined one of the cabaret establishments as a salaried jack-of-all-trades.”
Shiraishi became the manager of an 18-member jazz band called New Herd. This coincided with the emergence of TV broadcasts, and the band saw a surge in demand — not only in concert performances but across radio, television and the recording industry. New Herd also backed some of the nation’s biggest stars, including Chiemi Eri and Hibari Misora, arguably the most iconic Japanese diva of the 20th century.
“TV programs were full of music,” Shiraishi says. “On busy days, we’d go to perform on as many as five shows in a single day.”
City of black markets
Meanwhile, Tokyo’s so-called markets were thriving across the city. These bustling, often informal spaces sold everything from food to household goods and played a vital role in daily life. For folks like Shiraishi, constantly on the move between studios and rehearsal halls, such markets were convenient spots to pick up essentials.
Initially synonymous with yamiichi, or black markets that had emerged under Japan’s wartime and postwar controlled economy, these spaces had sold goods obtained through unofficial or prohibited channels in response to widespread shortages. Still scarred by air raids and strategic building demolitions designed to prevent fires, the city offered plenty of vacant lots — especially around train stations — that were quickly and often illegally occupied.
Just five days after Emperor Hirohito declared Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Shinjuku Market opened. Soon, similar markets sprang up near major stations including Ikebukuro, Shibuya, Shimbashi, Kanda and Ueno before spreading to suburban station fronts and roadsides.
Their wooden, street-side structures endured beyond the 1950s, after price controls were lifted, and gradually evolved into legitimate, low-rise commercial spaces. Long before supermarkets took hold, they shaped the postwar urban landscape as practical, communal hubs of commerce.
Hailing from Gifu Prefecture, Masakazu Ishigure moved to Tokyo in the 2000s to attend university, and lived along the Odakyu Line running from central Tokyo to its western suburbs and beyond.
“When you head toward the city center on that line, you end up at Shinjuku, which is a really confusing and chaotic place full of towering skyscrapers and big parks but also home to clusters of wooden shacks and tiny bars you can find in narrow alleys like Omoide Yokocho and Golden Gai,” says Ishigure, an associate professor at Kwansei Gakuin University in Hyogo Prefecture and an expert on black markets.
“That’s what got me interested. I wondered why a place that looks like an informal, even illegal settlement still exists 70 years later right next to Shinjuku Station — the busiest train station in the world — even while redevelopment keeps pushing forward around it.”
Ishigure says detailed maps created in 1953 of Japan’s major cities before and after the war include a series that documents emerging markets across Tokyo’s 23 wards. These depict 281 markets in total. Ishigure has conducted further fieldwork and discovered they don’t capture every postwar market. Many were built after 1953 or were not shown on the maps.
By the 1960s, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government began large-scale redevelopment projects around major train stations from the perspectives of disaster prevention and urban planning. Many shops that had existed since the black market era were given priority to relocate into new buildings constructed in these areas, including the Shinbashi Ekimae Building 1 and 2 standing by JR Shinbashi Station that were completed in 1966.
“I find these places fascinating, and they’re the focus of my fieldwork,” Ishigure says. “Take the Shimbashi Ekimae Building. If you walk through the main underground passage, it feels like a relatively wide corridor, but behind that are narrow alleyways with tiny counter-only shops tucked inside.”
Ishigure says these spaces were deliberately designed to reflect the scale of black market-era shops. “What’s interesting is that these traces of yamiichi aren’t unique — they exist all over Tokyo. It’s a kind of redevelopment where footprints of that time haven’t been erased but somehow inherited and preserved.”
For example, Ueno’s Ameya-Yokocho (Ameyoko), now a popular tourist destination, began as a patchwork of street stalls set up on wartime demolition sites between Ueno and Okachimachi stations, eventually expanding under the railway tracks. Over time, these stalls were relocated into permanent structures, including the precursor to the Ameyoko Center Building.
Today, the basement of the complex is known for its vibrant selection of ethnic foods and produce, evoking the atmosphere of a Southeast Asian street market and a reminder of the strange persistence of urban history.
Fireproof facades
Through an arranged marriage, Shiraishi tied the knot with his wife in 1964. This was the year of the Tokyo Olympics, when the capital was undergoing an unprecedented infrastructure drive. A new sewage system gushed into action and 100 kilometers of highways were freshly laid. Thousands of new office buildings and homes sprang up and the world’s first bullet train roared between Tokyo and Osaka in October that year.
Student movements swept across the nation in the late 1960s, culminating in a historic two-day showdown on Jan. 18 and 19, 1969, that saw the last barricading occupants of the University of Tokyo’s Yasuda Auditorium captured by police. It was around then that Shiraishi began managing Masahiko Sato, a jazz pianist, who married author and actress Chinatsu Nakayama in 1971.
“Some years later, Nakayama told me that she decided to get a divorce from Sato,” Shiraishi says. “She was harboring political ambitions and ran for the 1980 Upper House election and won a seat. She asked me to work for her, and I became her official secretary as well as her manager.”
At the time, Shiraishi was living in Magome, in the same property his family had moved into and experienced their third air raid back at the tail end of the war. His home was among the many residences that defined the era: simple and practical.
In postwar Tokyo, new buildings were rapidly constructed to meet urgent needs, often using inexpensive materials. One prominent example was the distinctive kanban kenchiku (literally, billboard architecture) style — small, typically two- or three-story mixed-use buildings with flat, decorative facades that masked traditional wooden structures behind them. Found throughout Tokyo’s shopping streets in the 1950s and ’60s, these quick-to-build hybrids projected modernity amid recovery. Many have disappeared, but quite a few are still around today.
“Tokyo is a city that has evolved since the Edo Period (1603-1867), with its structure changing each time there was a major fire or earthquake,” says architect Mitsuyoshi Miyazaki who heads Hagiso, a Tokyo-based creative collective revitalizing urban spaces through architecture, art and community engagement. “In a sense, it has undergone a kind of metabolism through these disasters.”
Miyazaki says the current form of Tokyo has been heavily shaped by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which saw ravaging fires destroy a vast swath of the city. “In the aftermath, urban policy led to the replacement of buildings in the city center, such as in Ginza and the ‘brick town’ areas, with fire-resistant structures,” he says. “But as you moved farther out, to places like Kanda or Yanaka, there was less money to spend. In those areas, kanban kenchiku was promoted. These were wooden buildings with fire-resistant facades essentially only fireproof on the surface.”
Other structures from the era, like Miyazaki’s firm’s namesake Hagiso, a wooden apartment complex built in 1955 in the old, temple-laden neighborhood of Yanaka in Taito Ward, reflect the more domestic, residential side of postwar urban growth. Originally used as student housing for Tokyo University of the Arts, it narrowly escaped demolition after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, when a farewell art exhibition drew unexpected crowds.
Miyazaki, a former resident, led its revival into a compact cultural space with a cafe, gallery and event venue. He later expanded the concept with Hanare, an old house renovated into a hotel that reimagines the neighborhood as part of the guest experience. He’s since continued working to preserve similar modest postwar buildings, advocating for their value as cultural assets rather than disposable remnants.
Yanaka, like many other districts, fell victim to U.S. air raids. Adjacent to Miyazaki’s home stands the Mishima Jizo-son, a stone slab with carvings of a Jizo deity commemorating the approximately 500 people who were killed or injured during the bombings the area suffered on March 4, 1945.
“If I’m optimistic, I envision a future where traces of the town’s original character remain and buildings in styles like kanban kenchiku can have their heritage preserved and passed on,” he says.
“Wooden structures can last indefinitely if properly maintained, but they often disappear due to economic reasons or lack of knowledge. Even when rebuilding is necessary, the spirit of the place can still be carried forward. If we approach this thoughtfully, the city has the potential to become even more vibrant and interesting.”
The ever-growing metropolis
By the mid-1980s, Shiraishi moved on from talent management and began working at a television commercial production firm as an HR official. The company didn’t last long, however, as it piled on debt amid the free-lending fervor at the height of the bubble economy. He transferred to a video production company and then to a new satellite communication firm.
“But that went bust, too, and I got tired of all of this and decided to move to the countryside,” he says. After living and breathing in the heart of the capital for half a century, Shiraishi relocated to the scenic town of Fujikawaguchiko in Yamanashi Prefecture, near Mount Fuji.
Tokyo had changed drastically by then. The goal in the 1950s and ’60s had been to decentralize Tokyo’s business districts, which had traditionally clustered around Tokyo Station, and shift some of that activity westward. Redevelopment of Tokyo’s office districts was later folded into broader efforts to revive the economy in the aftermath of the asset-price bubble’s collapse in the early 1990s, according to Hitoshi Kuwata, a professor at the Shibaura Institute of Technology and an expert in urban planning.
By the 2000s, “urban regeneration” had become a buzzword among policymakers, and major redevelopment projects began gaining momentum.
“One big issue with Tokyo’s current development is its growing scale,” Kuwata says. “Only large developers are able to carry out these massive projects. But if you look at areas near Tokyo Station — places like Yaesu or Shimbashi — you’ll find that even within smaller, older buildings, there’s a mix of diverse activities that make the city lively.”
With Japan’s demographic decline fueling a labor shortage and construction costs soaring, the feasibility of large-scale redevelopments is increasingly in doubt. Case in point: The planned overhaul of Nakano Sunplaza — a cherished Tokyo concert venue since 1973 — has been officially canceled due to skyrocketing expenses.
“The challenge is how to balance large-scale development with maintaining the appeal and disaster resilience of smaller, more vibrant urban spaces,” Kuwata says.
Meanwhile, Shiraishi kept himself busy. When Mount Fuji was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013, he became his town’s official nature guide, helping to support and educate visitors to Japan’s highest peak, including many students on school trips.
Yet the memories of the bombings from his childhood lingered like slow-burning embers. After a few years working as a guide, he decided to return to Tokyo and knocked on the doors of the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage to recount his story to the younger generation.
“War survivors are now elderly, with many already deceased. Within a few years, none — including myself — are expected to remain,” he says. “Once the firsthand witnesses are gone, the harrowing stories of that night’s devastating firestorm and its tragic toll risk being lost forever.”
But his reflections go beyond the horrors of that night. He saw how entertainment, politics and business evolved during Tokyo’s postwar recovery and reinvention. And while the tree of his life may be entering its final season, he still has stories left to tell.
“I have so much more to share,” he says, settling his bucket hat back on as the interview — now running overtime — draws to a close. At the door, he pauses, glancing back with a trace of reluctance.
“Why don’t you call me soon,” he says. “We can pick up where we left off.”
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