Japanese artist Hiroshige and fireworks in art

The great Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) is currently featured in an exhibition at the British Museum entitled 'Artist of the Open Road', which includes one of the pictures I used in my book A History of Fireworks from their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion Books) in the chapter on fireworks in the arts.

Entitled Fireworks over Ryogoku Bridge (1858), it is a woodblock print showing a display at the famous bridge built in the seventeenth century over the Sumida River in Tokyo. The area remains a popular venue for pyrotechnics to this day, and there is also a fireworks museum. 

Not featured in the exhibition, but included in my book is another of Hiroshige's prints Enjoying the Fireworks and the Cool of the Evening at Ryogoku Bridge (c. 1847). This work concentrates on the audience rather than the fireworks.

Although there are many fine pictures of fireworks from famous painters such as Turner, Whistler and Joseph Wright, quite a few artists have found the audience as interesting as the spectacle. As early as 1579, Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla’s depiction of the celebrated Castel Sant’Angelo display in Rome shows a rather blasé crowd. Although they are so small in the frame to be almost a detail, on close examination they seem to be chatting among themselves rather than taking in the great events in the sky.

While in Fire-Works on the Night of the Fourth of July (1868) by the American artist Winslow Homer, the fireworks are incidental and our eye is drawn to the toff in the foreground, whose hat is being hit by a falling rocket

This is the link for the exhibition - https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/hiroshige-artist-open-road?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22446594171&gbraid=0AAAAADPXika-SUY2YYg-fnS52S2BwTZU-&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIj92kspndjgMViplQBh187xnjEAAYASAAEgJp0vD_BwE

After a disaster: return or move away?

After the Great Fire of London in 1666, there were plans to sweep away London's courts and alleys and replace them with something grander and neater, but many of them survived (and still do). A lot of Londoners wanted to rebuild the city much as it had been before the fire.

After the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, it was a similar story. Grand designs floundered because locals wanted to live in the same kind of homes in the same places as they had before. And when the Ugandan government tried to get people to settle away from an area devastated by floods in 1978, they too ran into opposition.

Now history seems to be re-repeating itself in Japan. After an earthquake and tsunami caused meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power station in 2011, some argued that the 80,000 people evacuated should be persuaded not to return, but to go and live somewhere else. 

And some have, but older people in particular seem to be keen to go back to the places they still think of as home. The town of Naraha is the first to be declared safe by the government.

Tokyo - 70 years on from one of history's deadliest air raids

Seventy years ago this week, Tokyo and other Japanese cities were laid waste in a series of devastating air raids. On the night of March 9 and 10, 1945, more than 300 bombers dropped incendiaries on the Japanese capital for over two hours.

This resulted in what was said to be the worst man-made fire in history. Many of Tokyo's citizens lived in tightly packed, flimsy wooden buildings, and for the loss of just 15 aircraft, the Americans were able to destroy more than a quarter of a million structures. 

Fires raged for four days, and the death toll may have been as high as 140,000 - a similar number to the Atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, and nearly twice as many as the one on Nagasaki. Over the next few days, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe all suffered similar fates to Tokyo.

While last month's 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden was marked across Europe, in Tokyo, there is little today to commemorate the devastating raid of 1945, apart from a memorial (pictured) and a charnel house in a park. For more, see A Disastrous History of the World. 

Aircraft that vanished - 2

The continuing failure to find any trace of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared on March 8 will cast a shadow over the annual conference of the world’s airlines that opens today in Doha.

But as I have mentioned before, aircraft DO disappear (see my blog of April 13). On the night of June 23, 1950, in what was then America’s deadliest ever commercial airliner accident, a Northwest Orient DC-4 with 58 people on board went missing en route from New York to Seattle.

It vanished from radar screens 3,500 feet above Lake Michigan. Divers turned up some upholstery and other light debris, but the main wreckage has never been found, so pity those trying to locate flight MH370 in the vastness of the Indian Ocean.

A Varig Brazilian cargo Boeing 707 disappeared just 30 minutes after take-off from Narita airport in Tokyo on January 30, 1979. In addition to six crew, it was carrying more than a million dollars’ worth of paintings. No trace has ever been found of people, paintings or aircraft.

* The story of the Moscow football stadium disaster of 1982 from the Romanian edition of 'Disastrous History of the World' - http://www.ziartricolorul.ro/tragedii-la-fotbal/

Japanese stoicism

There have been a number of comments about the stoicism and quiet determination shown by the Japanese people in the wake of last month’s devastating earthquake and tsunami. Just four days after the quake, for example, in spite of power cuts, transport disruption, fears of aftershocks and nuclear radiation, people patiently queued to make sure they handed in their tax returns on time.

This is not a new phenomenon. After the earthquake of 1923 that killed perhaps 150,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama, and left nearly two million homeless, the Times of London reported: ‘There is no panic and marvelous patience is shown by all classes.’

All day and night, wrote the correspondent, there was an endless procession of people ‘carrying portable goods and their salved belongings, or using trunks and carts....a whole family pushing them along, often with the grandparents riding on the top of the pile…. the weak were carried on the backs of the strong.....they exhibited patience beyond praise. Many jested; some even began to rebuild their homes before the ashes of the old homes were cold.’ Within days, businesses and shops were starting up again in the stricken areas.

For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Japanese earthquakes

We have seen some astonishing television pictures of a raging tsunami, but we still have no real idea of how many people may have been killed in Friday’s earthquake in Japan. The town of Rikuzentakada is almost completely underwater, while at the port of Minamisanriku, around 10,000 people are missing, though the authorities did manage to evacuate about 7,500.

Japan is no stranger to earthquakes. Back in 1703, Tokyo – then known as Edo – was devastated in a quake that killed an estimated 150,000 people, and there was a similar death toll in the one that struck the city just before noon on September 1, 1923.

Tokyo has always been a city of close-packed houses in narrow alleys, and in 1923 they were mainly built of wood and paper. Many families were cooking on open stoves, and when these fell over, they started fires all over the city, which then combined into furious conflagrations, which claimed more victims than the earthquake itself.

When the rebuilding began, there were suggestions that Japan’s capital should be moved to a new safer site, but people decided they wanted to go on living where they always had.

*I was interviewed about the earthquake on the BBC’s Three Counties Radio, and you can hear the interview via this link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWbgV42j4Uc

Japanese war crimes - the search begins after 66 years

An excavation has begun in Tokyo to try to find human remains linked to a programme of biological warfare experiments inflicted on prisoners of war during World War Two. At a base in occupied northern China, the Japanese ran an operation known as Unit 731, in which thousands of prisoners were supposed to have been injected with agents causing diseases like typhus and cholera.

The unit is also alleged to have dissected victims alive and to have frozen prisoners to death. It is believed that some of the remains of those killed were taken back to Tokyo for analysis. In 2006, a former nurse, now aged 88, said that she and colleagues at an army hospital at the site now being investigated were ordered to bury numerous corpses, bones and body parts before the Americans came, following Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

According to a history professor at Kanagawa University, the site was the research headquarters of Unit 731. The slowness in looking into the former nurse’s claims will be seen as another example of Japan’s lack of enthusiasm for investigating the crimes the regime perpetrated during World War Two.

Fragments of bone, many showing saw marks, were found at a site nearby in 1989, but the government said they were not linked to Unit 731. In 2002, a Japanese court rejected claims for compensation from 180 Chinese people who claimed they had been victims of Japan’s biological warfare unit.

Air India + 25 years - a conviction

More than 25 years after the deadliest ever terrorist attack on a single aircraft, a Canadian Sikh who helped make the bomb has been convicted of perjury. On June 23, 1985, an Air India Jumbo jet flying from Montreal to London exploded off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people on board.

In 2003, Inderjit Singh Reyat, who had already been gaoled for his role in another bombing at Tokyo’s Narita airport, was sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter in connection with the Air India attack. It was widely believed that he had been given a light sentence in return for promising to testify against two other suspects.

At their trial in 2005, though, he said he could not remember anything about them, and they were acquitted. The bombings were believed to be in retaliation for the storming of the Golden Temple, the Sikhs' holiest shrine, by Indian troops in 1984. Reyat will be sentenced at a later date.

The Canadian security services were heavily criticised for a "cascading series of errors" that led up to the bombing. It was claimed that warnings were ignored, unauthorised people were allowed to wander freely on the aircraft, and that a sniffer dog had arrived too late to search it. For more on the attack, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Quakes in capital cities

The Haiti earthquake may be the deadliest ever to hit a capital city if the estimate of up to 200,000 killed is accurate. The Tokyo quake of 1923 killed about 150,000 in the Japanese capital and its port Yokohama, and about 1.9 million were made homeless, as up to 360,000 buildings were destroyed.

Within days, though, businesses and shops left standing had begun trading again, and seven years later, it was said that Tokyo had been restored with scarcely a single visible scar from the disaster. A plan to rebuild the capital at a new site, less vulnerable to earthquakes, was rejected.

The Lisbon earthquake of All Saints' Day 1755 struck a city that was then not just the capital of Portugal, but the hub of a great empire. As many as 90,000 people were killed, while thousands of buildings were flattened - much of the damage being done by the fires that broke out after the quake. The king put his prime minister, the Marquis of Pombal, in charge of reconstruction, and Pombal turned his coach into an improvised office among the ruins, living on soup brought in by his wife as he got to grips with the crisis.

He posted guards at exits from the city to stop any able-bodied men from leaving, then pressed them into work on the clean-up, while he sent ships to all corners of the empire with the message that the capital was still open for business. Some, like the Jesuits, argued that the city should not be rebuilt as the quake was a punishment from God, but within a year the Marquis was constructing a new Lisbon with the big squares and long avenues that form the elegant heart of the city we see today, and which his statue surveys from the top of a tall column.

Great Tokyo earthquakes

Today is traditionally a day for looking back, so that’s what I’m going to do – 306 years in fact, to December 31, 1703. On that day, Tokyo, then known as Edo, was hit by an earthquake that killed more than 2,000 people.

Worse, though, was the tsunami that followed it. This hit the Boso Pensinsula and Sagami Bay, and some put the total death toll as high as 150,000. If this is accurate, it would make it the most deadly tsunami in history after the Boxing Day disaster of 2004.

220 years later, Tokyo would be hit by another fearsome earthquake on September 1, 1923. As devastating as the quake itself were the fires that swept through the city’s packed wooden houses as kitchen cooking braziers were knocked over.

The fires raged for days, and Tokyo lost more than 300,000 buildings. Its port Yokohama, 18 miles away, also suffered dreadfully, with the loss of 60,000 buildings. Altogether, 150,000 people were killed and nearly 2 million made homeless.

Terrorism

After the death of 15 British soldiers in 10 days in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown and his Labour colleagues have again been banging the “War on Terror” drum. How instructive last night, then, to watch the thought-provoking Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution on BBC-2.

It was the Reign of Terror of Robespierre and his henchmen that gave us the word “terrorism” – “the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective”. (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

However, governments of all colours have managed to obscure an important fact. The most dreadful acts of “terrorism” are almost invariably perpetrated by them, rather than the rebel groups to whom the term is normally applied. Hardly surprising as governments usually command far more powerful weapons.

So we are constantly told that 9/11 was the world’s worst terrorist outrage – killing nearly 3,000 people, but, of course, it does not compare with, say, the USAF’s bombing of Tokyo in 1945 that killed perhaps 140,000, nor with Hitler’s mass murder campaign that accounted for perhaps 20 million, or Stalin’s cruelties that killed up to 30m, or Mao’s – maybe 70 million. Robespierre’s terror, incidentally, saw off about 55,000.

As a few of those around him raised the odd timorous voice to express half-hearted misgivings about the ever-more intrusive and paranoid regime he had created, Robespierre retorted: “innocence never fears public scrutiny.” Or as Labour tends to put it when critics object to its National Identity Register or its project to snoop on all our emails etc, etc – “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

World's deadliest air raid

On this day...64 years ago, perhaps the deadliest air raid in history was mounted on Tokyo by the USAF. Millions of its people lived in closely-packed wooden houses in the world’s most densely populated urban area, while the Japanese capital’s defences and its medical services were in a poor state.

More than 300 B-29 bombers dropped incendiary bombs for over two hours. For the loss of just 15 aircraft, they destroyed more than a quarter of a million buildings, and perhaps 140,000 people died.

The atomic bomb dropped six months later at Hiroshima killed 92,000 in the immediate aftermath, though up to another 50,000 are estimated to have died in the years that followed from the effects of radiation.

Fire of the Long Sleeves

On this day....352 years ago, one of the most disastrous fires in history swept through the Japanese capital of Edo (now Tokyo). It all started when a priest was burning an unlucky kimono, which had been owned by two teenage girls who had both died before they got a chance to wear it.

As he was performing this important task, a violent wind got up and fanned the flames until they were out of control. Tokyo was a warren of narrow alleys, lined with small houses built of wood and paper, and for two days the “Fire of the Long Sleeves” ripped through them. It was only when the wind died down on the third day that the blaze started to abate.

By then the flames had destroyed more than 60 bridges, 300 temples, and 500 palaces, razing perhaps 70% of the city. The death toll was estimated at up to 100,000 out of a population of 300,000.

Arson

Police in Australia are questioning two men in connection with the bush fires that have killed at least 180 people, though it is not clear whether they are under suspicion of arson or looting. If many of the fires turn out to be arson, this will be one of the worst cases in recent years, though probably not as deadly as the incident on February 18, 2003, when 198 people died on an underground train in Daegu, South Korea.

The arsonist was an unemployed former taxi driver, who was apparently unhappy about the medical treatment he had received following a stroke, and the fire may have been a failed suicide attempt. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but died in gaol a year later.

A more novel punishment was handed out to an arsonist in the fourth century BC, who destroyed the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus - one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The young man was named Herostratus, and apparently did it so that, in the words of a Roman historian, “his name might be spread through the whole world”. Not only did the authorities execute Herostratus, they also forbade anyone to mention his name under pain of death. The fact that we are still writing about him 2,300 years later suggests this latter penalty was not altogether effective.

The very worst acts of arson, of course, have been committed by armed forces in wars. The Luftwaffe tried the tactic of creating a firestorm – notably in Coventry, where they killed more than 500 people. The same method was adopted with even more deadly effect by the allies, who killed more than 40,000 at Hamburg, a similar number at Dresden, and perhaps 140,000 in Tokyo.