Toward an “Unburnable City”

Abstract

In the late 1930s, during the first years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the Japanese government tasked the Home Ministry (Naimushō) with the promotion of urban civil defense. A critical element in these government media campaigns was the promotion of the “unburnable city” (moenai toshi), an ideal cityscape that could better withstand the incendiary ravages of aerial bombardment. This article examines the multimedia “unburnable city” campaign in Japan from two perspectives: as part of broader international concerns regarding the effect of aviation technology on modern warfare in the 1930s and as a regional issue that required unique representational strategies to adequately convey the threat of aerial attack not yet experienced in the Japanese homeland. I discuss how memories of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake and its subsequent fires functioned as a traumatic surrogate to communicate the physical and emotional stakes of civic duty and urban reform to Japanese urbanites mobilizing for “total war.”