bakufuu, hinoumi: bomb wind, ocean fire (2020)
22 minutes and 26 seconds
16:9, color, sound

Kohei Shiba, my maternal grandfather, harvests jagaimo (potatoes) in Nakameguro, Tokyo, where his family has lived for five generations. Seventy-five years ago, when Kohei was fifteen years old, this same land was the target of US air raids. The Bombing of Tokyo still haunts the living: the wind evokes the bakufuu (bomb winds) that stole the breath of the land.

During Operation Meetinghouse, on March 9, 1945, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) flew 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers and dropped two thousand tons of napalm bombs, killing more than one hundred thousand people. The USAAF intentionally planned this operation on a night forecasted for high winds, what people in the region call the Karakaze—a dry monsoon in early spring that blows from the Sea of Japan over the Kantō mountains to the Pacific Ocean.

The Karakaze fueled an immense firestorm, quickly consuming Tokyo’s wooden houses. Kohei, his family, and their neighbors desperately spread water over the blistering land; with no place to run, many jumped into rivers like the Sumida, only to freeze or burn to death. “No longer a river,” Kohei reccounts, “the Sumida became a mountain of corpses.”

Bakufuu, hinoumi (Bomb wind, ocean fire) is structured around my grandfather’s oral histories of the Tokyo air raids, recorded over the past three years. Kohei reflects on his early adolescence during wartime Japan: horses running in the blackness of night, shaping nuts and bolts in a factory for the nation’s war effort, wearing white to deflect the light of the atomic bomb. The video comprises recent footage of my family’s home in Nakameguro, archival footage from the US National Archives and Records Administration, and appropriated animations.