Hachiōji Memorial Tower for the War Dead (八王子市戦没者慰霊塔) 八王子市戦没者慰霊塔

On 2 August 1945, in two hours, 169 B-29s burned eighty per cent of the city

The current tower dates from October 1965. The inscription says that it honours ‘the heroic spirits who fell for the homeland from the Satsuma War to the Pacific War, and the souls of those who died in the bombings’: in other words, it places the soldiers of 1877 and the civilians of 1945 under a single formula. On the night between 1 and 2 August 1945, from 00:45 to 02:45, 169 B-29s dropped about 1,600 tonnes of incendiary bombs on Hachiōji: 445 dead, more than two thousand injured, fourteen thousand houses burned, eighty per cent of the city. In the same park a first monument had been erected in 1896 for those who fell in the war with China, and it was removed at the end of the war. Over this class of monuments (the chūkonhi and the chūreitō, that is, the steles to the war dead erected by reservists' associations) hangs a constitutional question decided in court, and it should be said at once that the case does not concern this tower but the category it belongs to. In February 1976 thirteen citizens of Minoo, in Osaka, sued their municipality: it had used public money to pay for moving one of those steles, and the school superintendent took part in the memorial ceremony held there. The Osaka court ruled in their favour on 24 March 1982, judging the stele a religious structure and the expenditure contrary to the separation of state and religion. The court of appeal overturned the ruling on 16 July 1987. The Supreme Court upheld the reversal on 16 February 1993, calling the monument by then ‘essentially secular’ and the officials' participation an act of social courtesy. In law the question is closed; in public debate it is not.

Tokyo

Nishi-Hachioji

https://theanimetrip.com/luoghi/torre-dei-caduti-di-hachioji