Published on October 17, 2019.
This article introduces Masayuki Takayama’s essay “Balloon Bombs,” published in Shukan Shincho, and discusses the U.S. bombing of mainland Japan, the Great Tokyo Air Raid, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Battle of Iwo Jima, Japan’s balloon bombs, the discovery of the jet stream, and the difference between Japanese and American wartime ethics.

October 17, 2019.
It is said that this self-assumed American is now lecturing the present Emperor, following the Emperor Emeritus.
If he only tells stories that insult Japan, His Majesty must surely become bored.
Why not talk about the difference between balloon bombs and atomic bombs?
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s essay titled “Balloon Bombs,” published in this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
This essay, too, proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
In 1944, the United States stopped fighting the Japanese Army on the battlefield and switched to the “Sand Creek” method of directly bombing the Japanese homeland and killing women and children.
Sand Creek is the name of a Cheyenne reservation in Colorado.
In 1864, gold was found there.
The whites became excited, but the Cheyenne were a brave tribe that had annihilated the Seventh Cavalry of that General Custer.
But the whites wanted the gold.
The whites waited until the Cheyenne men went out hunting, attacked the reservation, and massacred 500 women and children.
“A four-year-old girl came out carrying a white flag. The whites shot her dead without hesitation and scalped her,” testified the guide Robert Bent.
If women and children are killed, the seed of the tribe is cut off.
It is a form of ethnic elimination that has existed since the time of Moses.
The United States was trying to do that to Japan.
In order to stop the bombing of the homeland by B-29s, Japan moved to destroy all at once the airfields in China that served as bases.
This is the operation known as the Ichi-Go Offensive.
The U.S. forces retreated as far as Chengdu in Sichuan Province.
From there to Tokyo was 4,000 kilometers, too far even for B-29s.
Then the United States sought bases on the Pacific side, took Saipan, and also set about taking Iwo Jima.
Iwo Jima would become the sortie base for fighter planes that would directly escort the B-29s flying from Saipan.
Lieutenant General Kuribayashi, who defended the island, resisted for two months and extended the U.S. plan to capture it in “five days.”
“If we hold out even one more day, that many more Japanese children will survive,” Kuribayashi wrote.
The U.S. fighters that flew from Iwo Jima did in fact target women and children.
Shintaro Ishihara also came under machine-gun fire.
The slaughter expanded into the Great Tokyo Air Raid and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, but around this time Japan also began an attempt to strike back.
That said, Japan had no materials to build transoceanic bombers comparable to the B-29.
The only things that seemed usable were konjac tubers and Japanese paper.
So Japanese paper was pasted together with konjac glue, and a balloon ten meters in diameter was made.
It was filled with hydrogen, and a bomb was suspended from it.
Thus the balloon bomb was completed.
The meteorologist Wasaburo Oishi had predicted that it would be possible to bomb the American mainland with it.
In those days, the region above the troposphere was thought to be windless, but Oishi discovered that a jet stream flowing eastward at 60 meters per second existed there.
The Americans were fools, so they did not know it.
Thus, nearly 10,000 balloon bombs were released into the sky, and 10 percent reached the American continent.
However, what a balloon could carry was at most a 30-kilogram bomb or incendiary bomb.
Compared with the one-ton bombs scattered by B-29s, they were like toys.
Even so, there were results.
Several people were killed or injured in Oregon.
A balloon bomb became entangled in the high-voltage lines of the Hanford reactor, which was producing the Nagasaki-type atomic bomb, causing a power outage and significantly delaying the production of the atomic bomb.
More than that, the fear of bombs silently falling from overhead made the American people tremble considerably.
There was also talk of anthrax bombs.
They imagined that if they had made this kind of bomb, they would naturally have loaded it with biological weapons, and therefore the Japanese must be doing the same, and they frightened themselves on their own.
In fact, GHQ staff saw an advertising balloon raised by the nearby Nichigeki Theater, were terrified, and immediately had it taken down.
Regarding these balloon bombs, Kazutoshi Hando held a dialogue with Shiro Ito in the magazine Bungeishunju.
In it, he referred to the human casualties in Oregon and excessively denounced the inhumanity of the Japanese military, saying, “As many as six American civilians died.”
With all due respect, the U.S. military targeted not merely civilians but women and children, and killed hundreds of thousands.
Is that side of the matter acceptable?
His books are written according to the theory of Japan’s original sin, that “Japan’s warmongering group started the war,” and the evil United States always appears as the righteous judge.
He thinks of himself as an American, and, for example, does not hesitate to describe Emperor Showa as “so painfully conscientious that one could add the word ‘damn’ to it.”
Balloon bombs contain many implications.
Even though Japan was poor, it sufficiently terrified the Americans of material abundance, and the wisdom of using the jet stream was excellent.
The nobility of not loading them with anthrax is also something to be proud of.
It is said that this self-assumed American is now lecturing the present Emperor, following the Emperor Emeritus.
If he only tells stories that insult Japan, His Majesty must surely become bored.
Why not talk about the difference between balloon bombs and atomic bombs?