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The Showa Emperor's Tour of Tokyo, March 18, 1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Hotta Yoshie
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Abstract

On the morning of March 10, 1945, Hotta Yoshie could not believe his eyes when he saw the extent of the devastation caused by the massive firebombing raid on Tokyo's Shitamachi district that came to be known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid. On March 18, concerned about the fate of a close female friend, he again walked through the burned-out area, where he was astonished to witness the Emperor conducting an inspection of the damage at a shrine in Fukagawa. A quarter of a century later, in Hojoki shiki (Personal Reflections on the Hojiki; 1970), Hotta described these experiences in the context of the famous essay Hojiki by the poet Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216). The following extracts, translated by The Asia-Pacific Journal, are from Hotta's account of what he saw and his reflections on it in the context of Japanese politics and the Buddhist concept of impermanence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 14 , Issue 21 , November 2016 , e7
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2016

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References

Notes

1 This refers to Ienaga Saburo's lawsuit against the Ministry of Education for censoring his high school history textbook and the trial of Konishi Makoto, a member of the Air Self-Defense Forces, who was arrested for anti-war activities.

2 Hotta Yoshie, Meguriaishi hitobito (People I Have Met; 1993), Shueisha Bunko, 1999, p. 14.

3 Wakakihi no shijintachi no shozo (Portraits of Poets as Young Men), Shichosha, 1968. The book was V.I. Lenin, Selected Works in Two Volumes (1931).

4 Meguriaishi hitobito, p. 186.

5 Seiji M. Lippit, “Spaces of Occupation in the Postwar Fiction of Hotta Yoshie”, Journal of Japanese Studies, 36:2, 2010, p. 294.

6 Judgment, translated by Nokuko Tsukui, Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, 1994.

7 Miyazaki mentions Hotta in an interview published in Asia-Pacific Journal, September 8, 2014. See also Matthew Penney, “Miyazaki Hayao and the Asia-Pacific War”, Asia-Pacific Journal, 21 July 2013.

8 Jikan, Iwanami Gendai Bunko, November 17, 2015.