Remembering the Occupation in color

All you see are burned ruins, Tokyo and Yokohama blanketed in ash from a bird's eye view.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, at the Prime Minister's Official Residence, holds an aerial photo taken in November 1945 of central Tokyo in ruins. REIJI YOSHIDA PHOTO

Among the few structures still standing is the British Embassy, which survived the massive strategic bombings by the U.S. military during World War II.

The aerial photos are from some 10,000 color prints taken by U.S. servicemen, collected two decades ago by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda from veterans all across the United States.

"I feared those pictures would be scattered and lost," Hosoda, 60, said in a recent interview with The Japan Times.

The top government spokesman, with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's blessing, plans to hang five panels of aerial views in the Prime Minister's Official Residence, along with pictures of the corresponding scenes in present-day Tokyo and Yokohama.

Hosoda, who took the position as Koizumi's right-hand man last May, said he hopes to deliver some key visual messages to visiting foreign VIPs: that Japanese people, too, were victims of the war, and that Tokyo literally rose from the ashes.

After greeting a number of important foreign guests, Hosoda said, he has come to realize that few of them, after seeing modern Tokyo, can visualize Japan in rubble.

In addition, he said, many foreign guests have the impression that the Japanese people were a victimizer in the war, not victims as well.

U.S. bombers hit Tokyo some 130 times, killing more than 115,000 people. Across Japan, an estimated 600,000 civilians were killed in U.S. air raids.

"We started from zero. I'd like to call attention to our revival power," Hosoda said. "That will give courage to foreign guests, too."

Hosoda's quest for photos capturing images of Japan during the Occupation started in 1980, when he went to Washington to study at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He was stunned when Robert Steele, a U.S. veteran who was stationed in Japan during the Occupation, showed him some 100 color slides he took during that time.

Steele was the owner of the lodging house where Hosoda was staying.

When he returned to Washington in 1983 as head of a branch office of Japan National Oil Corp., Hosoda decided to collect similar color photos taken by U.S. servicemen during the Occupation.

"This project can't wait for another 10 years because most of the photographers would pass away and pictures would be lost," Hosoda wrote in a collection of the photos first published in 1985.

Working with the Mainichi Shimbun, Hosoda eventually gathered 10,000 color photos from U.S. veterans. It is now known as the Steele Collection.

The five pictures Hosoda has chosen to display in the prime minister's office were taken from a military airplane used exclusively by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan.

The airplane was on a maintenance flight at a very low attitude over Tokyo, offering its crew a view that few U.S. servicemen -- let alone any Japanese -- could ever hope to see, said Mitsuyo Iwao, who was a member of a Mainichi Shimbun team that edited the photo collection.

The slides are still in reasonably good condition, and prints made from them retain the original colors.

Most Japanese today think of Japan just after the war in monotone, because almost all published photos from those years are in black and white. Color film was a rarity in Japan at that time.

In addition, most pictures taken by Japanese photographers at that time deal with serious social issues, including the war-ravaged landscape or urban black markets.

But many shots in the Steele Collection were taken by U.S. servicemen interested in everyday life of people in a different culture.

Subjects include smiling kids on streets, flower-viewing parties and the daily activities of farmers and fishermen -- scenes rarely taken by Japanese photographers at that time, Iwao said.

"When I saw these pictures for the first time, I thought, 'Yes, this blue sky! This is it!,' " said Iwao, who now works for the Sunday Mainichi.

"That was the blue sky we saw when we were kids," said Iwao, who was born in 1946.

She observed it is true that life after the war was difficult for Japanese, as can be seen in the serious black-and-whites taken by Japanese photographers.

But there also was a sense of postwar liberation, vividly represented in the color photos taken by the U.S. servicemen, she said.

Hosoda said he is considering holding an exhibition, in a private capacity, of some of the other photos in the Steele Collection.