Skip to content

14th April 1945

On my way back to Miyanoshita I walked past the now familiar landscape of ruin and chaos, all the way from the embassy on Kudan hill to Tokyo station. No streetcars, no elevated trains, no subways were running. In our vicinity there was once more no electricity, gas, or water. In front of the kempei-tai headquarters someone had made a neat pile of rusty iron roofing, and beside it another pile of scorched and twisted bicycle frames, but nobody had come to take them away.

There was a long line of squalor and ragged fear waiting for the trains out of Tokyo. Two days ago the Tokyo metropolitan food section announced that the rationing system will be remodelled on the basis of the abrupt decrease in the capital’s population, which will be officially determined in a survey on the 20th. “There should not be even one single dishonest declaration,” urged the Yomiuri, squarely facing the problem of Tokyo’s “ghost population”, the non-existent residents whose names are used by many to pad their ration rolls.