Toyama Air Raid

Toyama was the administrative and commercial centre of Toyama Prefecture, with aluminium, textile and chemical plants in its northern industrial zone. According to Japanese Wikipedia, the city was placed on the American list of small and medium-sized cities for incendiary attack on the basis of population; planners first considered the northern factory belt but then chose the residential and commercial centre as the aiming area, citing disruption of commerce, workers' housing, prefectural administration and rail transport. Leaflets warning of bombing were dropped on 31 July and 1 August.

The raid was flown by B-29s of the US Twentieth Air Force on the night of 1-2 August 1945. An alert was sounded at 8:40 p.m. and an air-raid warning at 9:50 p.m. on 1 August; bombing lasted from about 12:30 a.m. to 2:27 a.m. on 2 August, roughly two hours. Of 182 aircraft dispatched, 174 bombed the city, dropping 12,740 incendiary bombs weighing about 1,465 tons. Japanese Wikipedia attributes the mission to the 73rd Bombardment Wing.

The American damage assessment found 99.5 percent of the 1.87-square-mile (4.84 square kilometre) target area destroyed, the highest rate among Japanese cities attacked with conventional bombs; Japanese Wikipedia gives a burned area of 13.79 square kilometres and notes that the northern factories were largely untouched. Death tolls vary by source from 2,149 to about 2,700; the inscription on the city's reconstruction memorial speaks of more than 2,700 dead, about 8,000 injured, and some 25,000 households and 110,000 residents affected (Japanese Wikipedia: 109,592 people in 24,914 households). Only a handful of reinforced-concrete buildings such as the Daiwa department store, the Electric Building and the prefectural office remained standing in the centre.

Toyama's war-damage reconstruction project was approved in December 1945 and the city was rebuilt on a grid of wide streets. The raid is commemorated by the War Damage Reconstruction Memorial Statue (the Statue of the Heavenly Maiden) on the Matsukawa river and by memorial events held each 1 August; the city's summer fireworks display also originated as a prayer for the dead and for recovery.