Walking the peaceful backstreets of Japan’s capital, you would never imagine that only a few generations ago, the city was ablaze after the deadliest firebombing attack in history. Textbooks, if they even cover the events of March 10th, 1945, might only mention the raid’s purpose (disrupting production), strategy (destroying light industry scattered through residential areas), results (military success for the U.S.), and casualty count (at least 100,000 dead over two and a half hours by common estimates). The textbook entry might end on a note that despite the high casualty count, the actions had been necessary to continue forcing Japan into surrender and saving countless lives on both sides in the process.
The firebombing, as well as many other actions of the U.S. at the end of the war, is a topic of endless debate. While critically important for informing our striving for future peace, statistical, ethical, and legal arguments do not portray the purely human impact of such an event, and they run the risk of leaving behind the people most affected.
For survivors, the family, friends, and hopeful futures lost to the firebombing were much more concrete. Where outsiders may merely see the casualty count, they counted the casualties in the paper records, pictures, and memories lost in smoke and ash.
The unfortunate reality is that these survivors have never had their losses officially recognized or comprehensively memorialized by either the Japanese government or that of the United States. Even while the U.S. quietly fails to mention civilian death toll of the firebombing in the greater context of the war (including the dropping of the atomic bombs), Japanese politicians refuse to acknowledge the Imperial government’s failure to protect, honor, or support the victims of the bombing. As a result, survivors have waged decades-long activist campaigns for recognition, reparation, and memorialization of their lost loved ones.
By the mid-2010s, most of the remaining survivors, children and young adults at the time of the bombing, were in their seventies and eighties, nearing their final decades of life. As they continued their fight to tell their story to politicians and the Japanese public, the survivors’ anxiety grew. If they were not heard now, the truth about the firebombing, as well as the memories of their lost friends and family, might be forgotten to younger generations.
It was this moment in time that was captured and memorialized beautifully by the 2021 documentary Paper City by Australian film director Adrian Francis. Shot around the 70th anniversary of the firebombing in 2015, the film focuses the activism of three elderly survivors in their twilight years of petitioning the government for recognition. Francis follows the subjects through their daily lives as they deliver impassioned speeches, collect reams and reams of signed petitions, and meticulously log names of lost neighbors on a meters-long calligraphic scroll.
Paper City’s subject matter is heavy, but its audience leaves the theater with the unshakeable impression of indomitable human spirit expressed by the three subjects of the film: Minoru Tsukiyama, Michiko Kiyooka, and Hiroshi Hoshino. Francis succeeds in portraying their worry of being forgotten while satisfying that anxiety through the very act of documenting their activism on film. The three survivors have sadly passed away since filming in 2016, but Paper City illustrates their bravery and conviction in a way that will not soon be forgotten.
I spoke to director Adrian Francis about the production of the film, his time with the three subjects, and his reflections on the film a few years on.
Official Trailer
Director Interview: Adrian Francis - Paper City (2021) Film
Please share a little bit about yourself, what led you to Tokyo and then to the Paper City project.
I first came to Tokyo in 2000. I moved here with my ex, who was Japanese, from Sydney. When his student visa ended in Australia, we took advantage of the relatively simple working holiday visa for Australians in Japan. After working for a few years, I went back to Australia for a few years to study documentary filmmaking as a postgraduate degree and then moved back here in 2008. So altogether it’s getting close to 20 years of living in Tokyo.
How did you first learn about the Tokyo firebombing?
After I came back to Japan, possibly around 2010, I watched Errol Morris’ film Fog of War. It’s about the life of Robert McNamara, who is most famous for serving as the Secretary of Defense in the Vietnam War. But the film talks a little bit about his younger days serving in the US Air Force during the firebombing attack on Tokyo. He was one of the officers in charge of calculating the ideal altitude of the planes, how to create the most destruction, and these types of things. You can trace his relationship with napalm and firebombing in Vietnam all the way back to the attacks on Tokyo.
For me, I had a vague notion that Japan was bombed outside of the atomic bombs, but it was through this film that I learned about the Tokyo firebombing of March 10th, 1945. My WWII study in school had been pretty basic. While we learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I think every kid in the world learns about, I otherwise didn’t really know anything at all about the experience of Japanese citizens during the war.
So watching Fog of War became a life-changing moment for me, in that it led me to make Paper City.
From learning about the firebombing through Fog of War, what made you decide you wanted to make the film?
By the time I saw the film, I had already been living here for several years. Apart from the initial shock at learning about the scale of death and destruction, the thing that really surprised me was that there’s almost no sign of what happened if you look around Tokyo today. In a way, I suppose the absence of signs is the sign.
In contrast, if you visit many German cities, you might find yourself in an area of town that looks rather new and charmless, but only a few blocks away are the parts of the old town that survived the Allied bombing campaigns. Those sort of markers of the history of bombing aren’t really as present here.
Also, at the time I was starting my research, I was asking Japanese friends, “Did this really happen? What do you know about it?” Most of them knew almost nothing about it. There’s no public museum or dedicated memorial, unlike other cities which incurred significant civilian losses like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Okinawa.
So I started trying to figure out why this memory was missing. Not only in the physical landscape, but also in people’s identities. I wanted to understand more about it and hopefully transmit this story to the audience.
The film is centered around three main characters, survivors of the bombing who were in their seventies and eighties by the time of shooting. How did you go about finding them and beginning to work with them?
Right at the beginning, my initial research led me to Tokyo Air Raid Survivors Association (東京空襲遺族会), the civilian group which came to feature in the film. I was able to get in contact with Mr. Hoshino, who helped to run the group and became one of the three characters in the film. Through that connection, a whole network of survivors opened up.
I also got in contact with the privately-run museum called Tokyo Center for Air Raid and War Damages (東京大空襲・戦災資料センター). This center was the setting in the film where some of the survivors gave a talk about the bombings. Through one of their researchers, I heard about the work going on in Morishita, where the local citizen’s group was finalizing the name list to build a memorial in honor of the people from that neighborhood who had died in the bombing. Through that, I met Mr. Tsukiyama, and he helped to portray that work in the film.
As for meeting Ms. Kiyooka, it was just plain luck, or fate, you could say. The scene is actually in the film. We were just waiting for the start of an event related to the 70th anniversary of the bombing, and I said to my DP, “Let’s just try to talk to somebody.” I asked Ms. Kiyooka if she was a survivor, and 60 seconds later we were exchanging business cards. You can see in this scene and others how open people like her were to strangers who were taking interest in them and their stories.
What was their reaction to you and your goals for the film, especially considering that you’re not Japanese?
Right at the beginning, I think they didn’t know what to make of me, but they were very open. Many of the people in the film have almost no filter, they were happy to open up and start talking about their experiences. I do think that after a while, they started to say, “There are no Japanese filmmakers doing this. Sometimes it does take somebody from outside to talk about these kinds of things.” But maybe sometimes they were a little bit embarrassed about the lack of support that they see from within Japan. Not just politically, but even with filmmakers or artists or other kinds of support for passing on their stories.
How did the plot and structure of the film come together? Did you originally plan to follow the activism of the survivors?
At the very beginning, I just imagined that I’d be interviewing survivors about March 10th and then with some contemporary footage, it would just be a film about history and memory. Then when I met the survivors and started to spend time with them, I saw that they are all doing these activities which I’ve seen referred to as “memory activism.”
I think it was particularly our conversation with Mr. Hoshino which kind of framed the whole project for me. These few hundred people involved with the activism over the last few decades have been fighting to keep the memory alive, because their fear is that the memory is quickly fading and will fade completely after their own deaths. It’s pretty apparent to me that if they hadn't been doing all of this work, we would know even less than the little we do about the firebombing.
It’s important to note that all of the memorialization efforts come from civilian activism, never from the state itself. So I realized that this fight to remember against the state’s willingness to forget was a major aspect in this story. If you just talk about the U.S. bombing on March 10th, you’re only capturing a part of the story. This post-war fight is also important. So the idea that the main action would take place in the present was the first step towards structuring the film, and then the idea of having three characters came along.
At the beginning, I was talking to my producer about how many people to focus on, ranging anywhere from one to even ten. But you have to have some kind of parameters, and we decided three looked like a good number. This made the scope wide enough to touch on the similarities and differences of the victims’ experiences in different areas of Shitamachi: Oshiage, Morishita, and Asakusa. We were also able to show that they were all fighting to leave behind memory in different ways, whether it’s direct political engagement or lobbying politicians, speaking to children and younger generations, or making local neighborhood memorials. So that’s where we began with the three characters, and we decided to go back and forth into memory through the film, threading their stories through with the political fight in the present day.
We weren’t making this for an American audience, or even a Japanese audience. We needed this to work for anybody, regardless of whether they know nothing or know quite a bit about the firebombing. That’s one thing that we were always mindful of and it was a really difficult needle to thread between overexplaining. The fact that it’s character-based means that you can still feel and be moved by the lives of these characters, not as lines in a textbook, but as seeing somebody’s life unfold.
The film has many shots of you accompanying them throughout their daily lives, in taxis, walking around the city, and so on. What was it like shooting with them, and how did you interact with them?
We shot the film over two years in spans of about ten days at a time, starting in March 2015 around the time of the 70th anniversary of the bombing.
When we first started shooting, we didn’t even know that Mr. Hoshino, Ms. Kiyooka, and Mr. Tsukiyama would be the characters. We didn’t really know any of the three yet, we just went with what was happening around those big events around the anniversary. I think we decided to focus on them in that first ten-day block.
We got to know each other a bit better, and they got to understand what it means to shoot a long-form film over time as opposed to a Japanese TV-style short interview. As I began to understand their stories, then places like Kototoi Bridge, Kinshi Park, and the overhead train line began to take more importance. So I started to direct in a more active way, making suggestions on where to go and what to do on our filming days.
Even the last scene of the film, where we are eating dinner with the Hoshinos in their home, was the result of my request to accompany them home after we finished shooting at the Survivors Association office. Of course, Mrs. Hoshino fussed a bit about the place being a mess, but I think at that point they trusted the process of the film enough that if I said something was important, then it would be fine with them.
Were you able to show the finished film to any of the three main characters before they passed away?
No, sadly. Ms. Kiyooka and Mr. Hoshino passed away before we finished editing. After we finished the film, I went straight to Melbourne for the world premiere, which at the time only happened online due to the severe pandemic restrictions put in place by the Australian government. As soon as I got back to Tokyo from Melbourne, I heard the news that Mr. Tsukiyama had passed away. We were just about to make a DVD and go to show him, since he didn’t have a computer to receive it digitally.
When did you first show the film in Tokyo? What was the reaction of the people you had worked with during production?
At the beginning of 2022, we didn’t have any prospects in Tokyo from our agent, but I knew I definitely wanted to show the film to everyone here in the city: the survivors who were in it, the crew, crowdfunding contributors, and the many friends who were roped into volunteering for various roles throughout production. So we set up a preview screening on our own and invited all of these people, along with journalists and distributors.
That was the day that people in the film, including Mrs. Hoshino, saw it for the first time. I think they were very moved. It wasn’t just because it was finished, but I think it was their first time seeing their lives on screen, their emotional lives. It wasn’t just the facts of what happened in the firebombing, but being able to see themselves living through this activism on screen for the first time. They had been talking about this for decades, but they had never seen themselves reflected in that way.
Before finishing the film, I felt like the slightly annoying presence around their events. Not in a really bad way, just like, “Oh, he’s here again? I already talked to him four or five times.” But when the film was finished, I think they really understood what we had been doing, and the power and value of it, particularly as they age and pass away. I think they see the film as one medium that preserves their legacy, almost like the museum or a monument.
The film also serves to educate people who may not otherwise know about the bombings. Other than the reactions of the activists themselves, what has been the audience response from within Japan?
I feel like plenty of people who have come to see the film didn’t know about it. Just recently, I’ve been able to attend about half of the screenings that we did at Stranger over the past two weeks and do a Q&A after the film. During the pamphlet signing session, many individual audience members of various ages spoke to me and said things like “I was born in Tokyo, I grew up in Tokyo, and I really knew nothing about this.” or “I grew up down the road and I had no idea this happened in my neighborhood.”
Last year during our seven-week run in Shibuya, the audience skewed older. Older people in their fifties or sixties tend to know more about the bombing because their parents’ generation either experienced it or were alive during the war. That direct connection is much closer. But for the grandchildren of those people, maybe now the great-grandchildren, they may never have heard it directly for themselves.
What’s interesting is that at the screenings this year, in a much quieter area of Tokyo, there were a lot of people in their twenties and thirties. I suppose that may be a word of mouth phenomenon, and for me that’s incredibly encouraging.
That generational gap was one of the worries of the activists, that the knowledge and memory being forgotten by younger generations if they weren’t directly informed.
Mr. Tsukiyama alluded to that in the film by saying that he tells kids, probably his great-grandkids generation, that the areas they are growing up in a place which was bombed when he was their age. But for kids, it’s almost like fantasy.
Even now, when I visit Kototoi bridge, I remember the painting that Ms. Kiyooka used to carry around with the B-29s flying around, it’s just impossible to imagine. I mean I’m probably more familiar with the story now than most, but I still cannot comprehend what that must have been like or that it happened here.
Have there been any audience member reactions you took special note of?
Sure, even in recent weeks there have been people who tell me about their personal stories of the bombing.
Just as an example, there’s a very well-known photograph in the film of the almost unrecognizable burnt corpses of mother and child on the ground. She was carrying the baby on her back when they died. This was a common occurrence that night as mothers tried to save their children. Some survived, many didn’t.
A few weeks ago, a man came up to me and said, “I’m 79 years old now, and I survived the air raid because mom carried me to safety on her back. I was six months old.” Other people have told me, “I survived because I was evacuated but my siblings died.”
These personal histories in a family are common. Some people say, “My parents and grandparents talked about it, but I never really listened. It just didn’t seem interesting or relevant.” Others say, “I asked my parents and grandparents, because I knew they survived it, but they never wanted to talk about it, and now they’ve passed away.” Those two responses are very common.
What’s clear to me is that the people in the film are not typical. Most survivors don’t go out in the streets, most people don’t become activists of any kind. There were plenty of people who never wanted to speak about it ever again, and they didn’t. So the role of these people who are willing to speak openly is incredible.
Paper City had screenings and won awards and honors in film festivals all around the world. How do the reactions of international audiences compare to the ones you’ve received in Japan?
Other than Melbourne, the only festival I was able to attend personally was in Germany.
The reaction in Germany was interesting because of the similarities in the history of the war. German cities were massively bombed by the UK during the war, and many civilian lives were lost in these bombings. In Germany, there’s not much focus on it. There’s not much space to talk about the bombings, because alongside the massive suffering of Jews and other minorities during the Holocaust, maybe it’s not a good look to focus on the suffering of German civilians. But it did also happen.
Audience reactions in Q&A sessions at the festival touched on this. The biggest thing for the German audience was not understanding the position of the Japanese government. Because with the Tokyo firebombing, we’re not even talking about the government failing to recognize the suffering of foreign nationals, we’re talking about the nation’s own people to whom a government supposedly has a duty of care. I think that was really mystifying to the German audience, who grew up in a nation where there are to a certain degree national conversations and memorialization of these types of things. The audience just couldn’t understand why the government wasn’t doing more for its own people.
As you depicted in the film, there does seem to be a lot of resistance or even apathy towards the activism of the survivors in the Japanese government. Why do you think there is such a lack of political support for their cause of memorializing the victims of the firebombing?
This is a huge question. At a basic level, I think it would be fair to say that, as a nation, Japan hasn’t really come to terms with the war.
What I mean by that is that until the day the war ended, the emperor was literally a god figure. The survivors spoke about how they as civilians lived increasingly under basically authoritarian rule as the war went on. At the beginning, there was a lot of patriotic spirit about the war in China, but the mood got darker and darker as the years went on. The gap between reality and propaganda grew larger, and people suspected the tide was turning, but they didn’t fully understand until the bombing started. Then they saw the government still saying they were winning this glorious war, but they couldn’t defend their own cities.
So then on August 15th, 1945, the emperor suddenly changed from a god figure to just a guy on the radio saying everything you’ve believed in means nothing. Every night, tens of thousands of civilians had been sacrificed, and to what end? I lost my family and friends, and to what end?
I think that very sudden about-face was traumatic for the nation, but then the American occupation began and the country immediately entered a period of rebuilding. At that moment, there was a focus on physical rebuilding: reuniting families, finding a job, finding food, reconstructing infrastructure.
All those kinds of things then gradually turned into economic prosperity, but I don’t think there was ever time for a national conversation on rebuilding the identity. Even today, the middle populace generally doesn’t talk about political or social issues in a very public way. So when it comes to people on the left or right, there are clear ideas of the legacy of the war. On the left, it was a Japanese Imperial campaign which resulted in a lot of terrible crimes in Asia and elsewhere. On the right, the idea is that European nations and the US are imperial powers that committed a lot of the same crimes, so why should Japan be singled out and blamed for everything? That goes along with a lot of war crime denial as well. But in the middle ground, it’s not really discussed.
One example of this is Yasukuni Shrine, which is controversial for its enshrinement of convicted war criminals. If you visit on August 15th, the anniversary of the end of the war, there are huge demonstrations, both massive peace marches and also nationalists cosplaying in WWII uniforms. There are riot police literally holding the two sides apart. Most people even in Tokyo have never seen that scene, but it happens literally every year.
On the other hand, Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent a safe place for Japanese war memory, because Japan is a globally unique victim of atomic bombs. But if you bring up anything related to conventional air raids with explosive and incendiary bombs, then people will say that Japan did that too. Japan bombed China 268 times. Japan killed many civilians, and clearly not only through air raids.
So one part of it is, if the Japanese government were to properly memorialize and compensate Japanese civilians, then there’s a strong political case that they have to do the same for people in China, Korea, and plenty of other places. The ruling party in Japan has objective connections to the pre-war government, such as politicians with direct family ties to military leaders and even convicted war criminals. They are protecting not only their nation’s legacy, but their family legacies. So for them, it’s just too much of a can of worms, and it gives them a vested interest in repressing these memories.
That’s a notable contrast with the legacy and family histories that the survivors are trying to protect. What are the remaining activists seeking in terms of support?
After the war, the government really washed its hands of supporting the people who were worst affected, economic or otherwise. Survivors are still campaigning now, and one of their petitions is for a token amount of money for about 2000 of the worst affected victims, people sustained very bad physical injuries, for example. But at this point, it’s not about the money. If there wasn’t any money but merely an apology, or a real memorial, then I think that would be even more significant. But whatever shape it takes, it’s just about the government publicly acknowledging the event and its own role in the suffering that occurred as a result of the firebombing.
It would be very similar to the public apology and reparations offered by the US government in relation to the Japanese internment camps. The survivors are seeking for their own government to take responsibility historically. But there’s no sign as of right now of something this big, and I don’t believe it will happen while power is so entrenched with one political party.
Outside of memorializing the victims, what are the lessons that the audience will take away from Paper City?
Sometimes when I’ve posted about the film online, some people in Australia said, “How dare you make this film? Why don’t you make a film about the Rape of Nanking?” And, I say, “Yes! Let’s make films about that!” I’m making this film for similar reasons.
In the end, the problem is that when we discuss war, many people still conflate civilians with the idea of a nation which is really guided by decisions made by military and government elites. If you look now in Gaza, there are plenty of people who won’t make any distinction between Hamas and the civilians in Gaza, they’re one and the same. It’s the same thing.
I wanted to focus on the civilian victims of war who suffered due to decisions that they have no control over. Victims of Nanking and the victims of the Tokyo firebombing are, in the end, the results of an imperial war campaign. Many people still just want to choose sides in these things, but I really hope that Paper City portrays that civilian victims of war, no matter where they’re from, need to be remembered. That’s the real legacy of this film.
You’ve mentioned in a previous interview that Paper City is a “Tokyo story.” In what way did this project, its production, and its reception, influence your perception of Tokyo, both the city and the people?
I feel like it has deepened my experience of the city and my understanding. In a way it’s made me think that I really don’t understand much at all. I’ve lived in maybe five or six cities now in my life, the longest being my hometown of Adelaide before moving here. But it’s made me think a lot about how when you move to a place or live in a place, you might read a little of its history or see some historical buildings, but it’s a pretty surface-level understanding.
This experience has made me think about how complex things are that shape the places we live, and there might be many turbulent, traumatic, and contested memories just under the surface, even in a peaceful place like this. Certainly in a huge city like, it’s easy for memory and history to get lost.
It has kind of made me more fascinated about life and the places we inhabit, and made me want to dig a little more under the surface. I’ve become interested in things like the Tamagawa Aqueduct, a piece of old castle town infrastructure which you can still find traces of today, all the way from the Tama river to just a trickle of water at its end in Tokyo. It’s a metaphor for the sort of layers of memory which are present here, it reminds me that I’m not just interacting with everything on the street level.
Now, I'm constantly seeking to know where I am in relation to everything else in the city, both in the present and in the centuries of history that preceded it. I have to ask myself, what was here before?
Watch Paper City (2021)
You can get all of the latest information on screenings and streaming of the Paper City film at the official website here. It is currently streaming worldwide at selected libraries and universities through Kanopy.
Additional Reading
Here are two recent news articles from the Asahi Shinbun and NHK about the remaining activists' continuing fight for recognition and memorialization.
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