The first air raid on Tokyo was carried out by the US Air Force in April 1942, and in 1944, the strategic bombing of urban areas began, which lasted until the day of Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945. During this period, Tokyo was hit by incendiary bombs twice: the first time was on February 25, 1945, when 174 B-29 bombers destroyed about 2,6 square meters. km of the city, using 453,7 tons of mostly incendiary bombs for this purpose.
The air operation called Meetinghouse, which was carried out on the night of March 9-10 of the same year, became the most destructive bombing not only of Tokyo, but also of the Second World War in general, exceeding in its consequences the raids on Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 334 B-29 fighters dropped 1665 tons of bombs on Tokyo, which destroyed 41 square meters. km of the city, as a result of which approximately 100 civilians died (according to some estimates, up to 130), 267 buildings were destroyed, and more than a million residents were left homeless.
Industrial buildings scattered throughout the city's residential and commercial areas were also damaged, resulting in an immediate halving of production. For Greater Tokyo with its 23 special districts, the consequences were even more devastating: an area of 195 square meters was devastated. km, which was 28% of the total area of the metropolis, and 710 buildings were destroyed.
Aerial photo of Tokyo, 1945. Source: nytimes.com
Tokyo after the bombings, 1945. Photo: Donated by Corbis-Bettmann. Source: aboutjapan.japansociety.org
Part of Tokyo after the bombing, 1945. Photo: US Army
Culture of disasters and reconstructions
Next to the destruction of Tokyo during the Second World War, historians always remember the previous catastrophic event for the city, which occurred on September 1, 1923 — the Great Kanto earthquake of magnitude 8-9, whose epicenter was located in the sea 90 km from Tokyo. Then the tsunami and fire created by the earthquake destroyed about 45% of the city area, 300 of Tokyo's 1 million buildings were destroyed, and the earthquakes themselves, of which 356 were recorded, destroyed almost all stone buildings.
Only the Imperial Hotel, built the year before by Frank Lloyd Wright's project, stood (the hotel also withstood the American bombing, but was demolished in 1976 to make way for modern high-rise architecture). Most of the reconstructed area after the earthquake was again reduced to rubble and ashes during the Second World War. Therefore, there is an opinion that it is the culture of disasters and reconstructions that is at least partially responsible for the irrational and visually chaotic urban landscape of modern Tokyo.
View of the earthquake-ravaged city from the roof of the Imperial Hotel, 1923. Photo source: rarehistoricalphotos.com
Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, built in 1923 by Frank Lloyd Wright
The spread of damage during the earthquake reflected the characteristics of the historical spatial structure of the city: fires were most destructive and deadly in the densely built-up eastern part of Tokyo, the so-called "low city", while greener and less densely populated residential areas in the hilly western part, the "high city" , survived the disaster mostly unscathed. This is how Japanese urban planners learned that large urban green spaces, such as Ueno Park, during natural disasters play the role of a fire barrier and a temporary shelter for those who have lost their homes.
The culture of disasters and reconstructions is partly responsible for the irrational and visually chaotic urban landscape of modern Tokyo
Akasaka residential area after the earthquake of September 1, 1923. Photo source: rarehistoricalphotos.com
In The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan, historian J. Charles Schenking examined how former colonial official Goto Simpei proposed a grand and expensive reconstruction plan that later became known as the "800 million yen plan."
Despite a significantly reduced budget and resistance from local residents, the six-year reconstruction project successfully modernized the central part of Tokyo. A rational street system was created with sidewalks, bridges, small town squares, public housing, and three large parks—all where there had previously been little open space. Despite the fact that most of the "assets" of this reconstruction were destroyed by the war, they became an important base for the new reconstruction of the city.
Reconstruction plan of 1946
When the "Basic Policy for the Reconstruction of War-Damaged Areas" was passed by the Cabinet in December 1945, the metropolitan government formulated the "Tokyo Urban Post-War Reconstruction Plan", which in many ways followed the green belt plan developed after the earthquake. The conceptual continuity of the city's development was also made possible thanks to Ishikawa Hideaki (1893–1955), Tokyo's head of planning in the prewar and postwar years.
An engineer educated at the University of Tokyo, Ishikawa also studied European planning. He believed that rezoning alone would not create a well-balanced city and sought to focus on the cultural, humanistic and aesthetic aspects of urban design. Ishikawa embodied his ideas in the "Tokyo Reconstruction Plan" of 1946. He had very specific ideas about the city, proposing decentralization and deconcentration of the urban population.
In his designs, he followed pre-war concepts, in particular the German idea of Stadtlandschaft (urban landscape), which had been developing since the XNUMXth century, combined with Anglo-American ideas, according to which cities were transformed by creating smaller quarters separated by green areas. The Stadtlandschaft resonated with Japanese planners, who had few legal tools to implement large-scale plans and who faced widespread opposition to any attempt at comprehensive planning. For all these reasons, they preferred small-scale schemes.
In the 1946 plan, Ishikawa Hideaki recommended the creation of new specialized centers around Tokyo that would function as a regional network
Ishikawa began developing his plan in October 1944, building on an earlier ring infrastructure plan with decentralized cores developed by Japanese planner Fukuda Shigeyoshi. He also drew on British examples, including Patrick Abercrombie's Greater London Plan (1944), and recommended the creation of new specialized centers around Tokyo that would function as a regional network. A 1946 sketch for the Kanto region depicts a connection between Tokyo and satellite cities such as Ota, Utsunomiya, and Mito.
Plan for the reconstruction of the central part of Tokyo, 1946
Shibuya district in 1952. Photo source: tokyofromtheinside.com
Hibiya Theater and Ernie Pyle Theater next to the old Tokyo Canal in a photo from 1949-1951. Photo source: thetokyofiles.com
Anticipating that Tokyo's population would increase after the war, Ishikawa sought to coordinate this growth with industry. He planned monofunctional cities with a population of 200–300 thousand, separated by green belts and connected by ring and radial road networks. Political and economic functions were to be decentralized to other cities within a radius of 40 km from Tokyo, while "culture" was to be concentrated in cities within a radius of 100 km. All these cities, according to Ishikawa's plan, were supposed to work in a network, reducing the population of the core of Tokyo from 6,5 million (pre-war figure) to 3,5 million.
The initial plan of Ishikawa provided for the redevelopment of an area of about 200 square meters. km, which exceeded the area of destruction. However, due to a lack of funding (in 1945–1946, the city received a share of the national budget for reconstruction roughly proportional to the amount of damage from bombings (26,6%), in 1949 it was only 10,9% of the budget) and the introduction by the Americans of the so-called "Doge line", reforms to stabilize the Japanese economy, the essence of which was to increase taxes in order to overcome inflation, the reconstruction plan of Tokyo, like other cities, was revised, which led to a reduction of the area to 50 square meters. km
Of this territory, only 14,4 square meters were reconstructed. km, limited to the areas around stations on the Yamanote, Keihin-Tohoku and Sobu lines. However, many of Ishikawa's proposed centers were later established, and to this day Tokyo is sometimes referred to as the "City of Villages". The American writer Donald Ritchie, who lived there for most of his life, described his experience of traveling through the city as being like passing through village after village, each with its own main street, with a bank, a supermarket, a flower shop, a pinball parlor, without street names or numbers, because local residents, "peasants", do not need them. Each such complex is a small town, and together they form a huge capital.
Public reconstruction
Lacking the budget to implement a full reconstruction plan, Tokyo's municipal government focused on rebuilding and building infrastructure, leaving the lion's share of construction to the private sector — companies and the residents themselves who lost their homes. So, in fact, the townspeople had to rebuild the city, house by house, block by block.
Tokyo quickly filled with people returning from the war or migrating from the countryside, and by 1955 the city had 7 million inhabitants. It was an incredible period in Tokyo's history, when ordinary citizens remembered and mastered the know-how of the past to build what would become part of the city of the future.
In total, between the late 1950s and early 1970s, Japan built more than 11 million new housing units, increasing its housing stock by 65%. At the same time, private companies and state institutions provided only a small part of it, the majority was created at the expense of owners of private houses and rental premises.
A Tokyo street after the bombing, 1945. Photo source: nytimes.com
Quarter near the Imperial Palace, 1945. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis. Source: www.theguardian.com
Tokyo, 1945. Photo: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images. Source: bbc.com
It is difficult to imagine Tokyo as a huge, growing slum, but in many ways that is exactly what happened in the post-war years. To this day, you can find hardware stores in most residential areas, and next to ultra-modern buildings made of steel, glass and concrete stand shack-like structures made of tin sheets and wood. This model of urban development is not unique to Japan—it can be found throughout Asia and other regions.
The difference lies in the attitude of the Japanese municipal government, which has allowed unplanned neighborhoods to grow and merge freely, not discriminating against them as slums, but treating them as legitimate, developing areas.
Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, Japan built more than 11 million new housing units, increasing its housing stock by 65%
It is interesting that in these multifunctional low-rise blocks with high density, which appeared not according to the project, all the necessary infrastructure was added already after their appearance, regardless of how messy they looked. Even the traditionally discriminated areas of the Burakumin, an untouchable caste, eventually gained access to state-of-the-art amenities.
In this way, Tokyo illustrates the simple but revolutionary idea that infrastructure can be adapted to the built environment. Perhaps this consistency explains why Tokyo's infrastructure is considered the most successful in the world today, not to mention its diverse housing stock and vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods.
The intersection of Hinashizaka and Fujimizaka streets, Tokyo. Photo source: minimalism.one
A wooden building in Tokyo's Asakusa district. Photo source: minimalism.one
Even before the war, Tokyo looked like a collection of semi-autonomous neighborhoods. The central part of the city was its historical core, Edo, which became Tokyo in the late XNUMXth century, while the periphery grew largely without planning. The city absorbed the surrounding villages, spilling out, and gradually adapted small tracts of agricultural land for residential, commercial, and industrial use. Residents who rebuilt the city almost single-handedly after the Second World War recreated their memories of it without thinking about progress or holistic perception.
Journalist Robert Whiting, who lived in Tokyo for many years, wrote that in 1959, when Tokyo won the bid to host the 1964 Olympics, the capital did not resemble the high-tech metropolis it later became. It was similar, according to Whiting, to an unattractive cluster of old wooden houses, shacks, cheaply built buildings and cottages. The latter were the state's contribution to providing the population with housing and were the Japanese version of "Khrushchevs".
The Japan Housing Corporation (JHC), founded in 1955, was engaged in the construction of danchi (literally "group land") apartment buildings. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, JHC built many cottages in suburban areas to offset the growing demand for housing during the post-World War II economic boom. For the Japanese, this was the first experience of housing for one family, in contrast to the pre-war situation, when several generations lived in one house.
The houses of the 1950s and 1970s were built according to the norms and seismic standards of that time. Most of these buildings later underwent seismic modernization, some were demolished and rebuilt with a renewed design to make them more attractive to young families.
Postwar social housing Aoyama Kitamachi Danchi. Photo source: kunukumo.com
Danchi in Mito. Photo source: strelkamag.com
In the building boom associated with the 1964 Olympics, less than two decades after World War II, the government and private developers built 10 new office and residential buildings 000-4 stories high, 7 km of new highways along vital arteries from Haneda International Airport, a $100 million monorail from the airport to downtown Tokyo, 55 km of subway lines, four five-star hotels, and the high-speed Shinkansen train that has halved the travel time between Tokyo and Osaka. But all these "miracles" appeared without affecting the post-war residential areas.
Chaos + order
There is a double perception by specialists of the urban structure of Tokyo, but its assessment should be compared with the worldview of the Japanese themselves, which does not cancel the general westernization of the country, which began in the post-war years, but still has a deeper driving force and influence on urban formation than it may seem at first. view.
According to the architect Kisho Kurokawa (1934–2007), one of the founders of the movement "metabolism" and the author of his program building Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) in Tokyo, Westerners misunderstand Tokyo as an informal and illogical city because of their dualistic perception about it as something that is divided into polar opposites: urban and rural, formal and informal, order and disorder. But Japanese culture, says Kurokawa, recognizes that disorder and order are inseparable: "The open structure, or receptiveness, is a distinctive feature of the Japanese city, shared with other Asian cities."
The Japanese do not see the city as a collective cultural product because Tokyo was completely destroyed in 1945 and most people grew up in the years of rapid urban growth in an environment where there were no old buildings.
This is why the Japanese are so tolerant of urban forms where neighborhoods develop and slowly integrate into the larger urban system on their own terms, which in Western thinking are irrational and chaotic. Tokyo was built around unstable zoning rules and became an integrated mixed-use city where small and narrow pedestrian streets combine with high-speed train lines.
Capsule tower "Nakagin" designed by Kisio Kurokawa: 1972. Photo: Akio Kon/Bloomberg
View of Tokyo from Tokyo Skytree, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Issei Kato
Prominent architect and 2019 Pritzker Laureate Arata Isozaki suggests that Japanese people do not perceive the city as a collective cultural product because Tokyo was completely destroyed in 1945 and most people grew up during the years of rapid urban growth in an environment where there were no old buildings. But it seems that the Japanese, with their penchant for organic urban development, managed to overcome the devastating effects of World War II and create Tokyo with its own unique type of urbanism.
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