BOMBING OF JAPAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 June 1942, Page 4

BOMBING OF JAPAN

PEOPLES’ MORBID FEAR OF ATTACK RAIDS ARE A NIGHTMARE. CITIES MOST VULNERABLE. NEW YORK, May 2. Japan was recently bombed. Her people’s morbid fear of attack from the air, which already had reached the proportions of a national psychosis, is beginning to be realised. That fear has accounted for many of the island empire’s war moves, writes Henry C. Wolfe in the “New York Times.” The Japanese literally live in a house of tinder. Their wood and paper and bamboo dwellings make their cities more vulnerable to air attack than the cities of any other great Power. Incendiary bombs are Nippon’s nightmare. Fear of fire is bred in the people. The Japanese is ordinarily stoical and fatalistic. He does not easily betray his emotions. He can endure great physical strain. He prides himself on being a member of a martial race. He speaks proudly of a Samurai tradition, of Bushido, the way of the warrior. When he goes to Yasukuni to pray for the spirit of his brother killed in the “China Incident” his face is as devoid of expression as a mask. EARTHQUAKE OF 1323. Yet confronted with fire hazard he has been known to break down. He has given way to panic. This he notably did in the earthquake fire of 1923, which destroyed about two-thirds' of Tokio. In a frenzy he and his fellows massacred hundreds of Korean labourers. The Japanese authorities know these contradictions in their people’s psychology. They know the deeplyingrained terror of fire in the Japanese mind. They have reason to suspect that under persistent bombing attacks the morale of the Japanese masses might weaken. The combustible Nipponese cities and the ever-present fear of fire make an ideal set-up for bombing attack, and Japanese war preparation in the psychological sphere has not been entirely successful. The militarists of Nippon, though they were among the first people in the world to institute air-raid drills in towns and cities, have found no answer to the problem of psychological defence against the incendiary bomb. UNEASINESS OF LEADERS.

What they promised the inhabitants of the great cities was that enemy bombers would never be able to reach Japan, The invincible Japanese army and navy would see to that. The defenders of Nippon would carry the war to the enemy and would keep the foe’s bombers far from the land of cherry blossoms. But the army and navy leaders were uneasy. Their uneasiness was brought home to me in a direct, personal way. When I went to Japan a year ago a certain “business man,” Kiyoshi Kanai, was almost constantly at my elbow. No matter what the company, I found him one of the guests. For a business man he took an extraordinary interest in American public opinion. Later, in Hongkong, United Nations intelligence officers told me that he was an important agent of the Japanese intelligence service. They charted the course of his questions and remarks. CONGESTED CITY. His aim was to learn more about American war psychology. American public opinion was a war factor that even the best Japanese spies operating' in the United States might fail to interpret correctly. Kanai’s specific assignment apparently was to try to find the answer to this question: Would sentimentalists in America oppose our bombing the wooden cities of Japan? All the ingenuity of the Japanese army and civilian authorities has been mobilised to solve the problem of attack from the air. Nothing, apparently, has been neglected. But every intelligent Japanese knows that no fire-fighting methods can protect the miles and miles of flimsy, cellarless, wooden houses in a great congested city like Tokio, with its 7,000,000 people.