Kenneth Hewitt. “The Social Space of Terror: Towards a Civil Interpretation of Total War.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5 (1987): 445-74.
From abstract: In the paper I seek to interpret modern warfare from the perspective of civil society and its geography. I emphasize the predicament of civilians who are subject to direct and deliberate armed assaults. Particular attention is given to enforced uprooting or removals of population, and to annihilation of urban places with weapons of mass destruction. Two case histories are explored, both taken from the last months of the Second World War. They are, the expulsion of German civilians from Eastern Europe, and the firebombing of Japanese cities, especially Tokyo.
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Kenneth Hewitt. “Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73.2 (1983): 257-84.
Examines the World War II destruction of German and Japanese cities as a process of “place annihilation”.
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Paintings depicting the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945 that were featured in a special exhibit hosted by the Sumida Local Culture Resource Center (墨田郷土文化資料館) in 2004.
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In this 2009 speech given by a central figure in the decades-long citizen’s movement to remember and memorialize the Tokyo air raids, Saotome Katsumoto discusses details of his own experience of the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Japan’s capital. He then situates the air raids on Tokyo within the context of twentieth century terror bombing campaigns and Japan’s “Fifteen Year War” in Asia.
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The author situates the Tokyo air raids and the postwar movement to remember them within the context of international law and the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations in urban areas.
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Bret Fisk provides a brief description of the types of first-person accounts that exist in Japanese regarding the civilian experience of the Tokyo air raids. Examples of such accounts are given under the headings: “Complete Personal Narratives,” “Incomplete Episodes and Incidents,” and “Sites of Mass Suffering.”
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Cary Karacas, “Place, Public Memory, and the Tokyo Air Raids,” Geographical Review, 100:4 (2010) pp. 521-537. An analysis of the movement to build a peace museum centered on the Tokyo air raids.
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