Imperial Remembrance of Bombing Victims

Today, Their Majesties the Emperor and Empress placed flowers at the Tokyo Memorial Hall in honor of the victims of the Allied bombing in World War II. The occasion was the 70th anniversary of the "Great Tokyo Air Raid" and the hall contains the ashes of roughly 105,000 victims of the bombings. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, mostly civilians, were killed in the conventional bombing raids on Japanese cities, many more than were killed in the two atomic-bomb attacks actually. After the war, at the war crimes trials in Tokyo and Nuremberg, no Axis officials or military personnel were convicted of war crimes for bombing civilian targets. The reason for this, of course, was simple; the Allies had bombed civilians themselves and did not want their people to face charges, so the issue was not taken up.