Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Even amid such extensive vistas of destruction, however, the conquerors found strange evidence of the selectiveness of their bombing policies. Vast areas of poor people’s residences, small shops, and factories in the capital were gutted, for instance, but a good number of the homes of the wealthy in fashionable neighborhoods survived to house the occupation’s officer corps. Tokyo’s financial district, largely undamaged, would soon become “little America,” home to MacArthur’s General Headquarters (GHQJ. Undamaged also was the building that housed much of the imperial military bureaucracy at war’s end. With a nice sense of irony, the victors subsequently appropriated this for their war crimes trials of top leaders. Railways still functioned more or less effectively throughout the country (Tokyo residents, for example, had been able to ride directly to distant Hiroshima to see if their kin had survived the atomic blast). Outside of devastated poor people’s neighborhoods, most utilities including electricity and water were also still in working order. Wittingly or not, U.S. bombing policy, at least in the capital city, had tended to reaffirm existing hierarchies of fortune.l8