What Tokyo Looked Like in 1945

Media near and far will be focused this week on the three-year anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that shook Japan on March 11, 2011. Without diminishing the conversation in Fukushima, it's worth shifting our cultural gaze for a few moments to the March 10 commemoration in Tokyo of an event of equal or greater proportion. That would be the U.S. air raids that annihilated the city back in 1945 — among the deadliest attacks of World War II.

Researchers Cary Karacas and David Fedman study aerial maps and photographs like the above to understand the "urbicide" inflicted on Japanese cities during the war. But what such documents offer in scope they lose in detail, so recently Karacas and Fedman turned to the ground-level photographs taken by Ishikawa Koyo. You have to consider both scales of visual evidence, says Fedman, to appreciate the event's full gravity.