00:02 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to Eitaibashi (永代橋，Eitai Bridge). This bridge has been around for centuries. It's been rebuilt a couple of times in the Edo period. It collapsed in the 19th century under the weight of people going to celebrate a festival at a shrine in Monzen-Nakacho (門前仲町). A lot of people died when the bridge collapsed because it was heavily populated. In the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the bridge was destroyed again. And in World War II it was bombed. I'm going to be showing you some damage that is still visible here. They didn't fix it all because they didn't really know about it until recently.

00:30 John Daub: It also has a pretty interesting history and I'm excited about this. I think that when you live in a city as long as I have here in Tokyo, it's really important to know about its past. Whenever you can see some of it remaining, and not a lot is available here in Tokyo to see because of World War II. This area in particular was heavily bombed in 1945, March 9th and 10th, Operation Meetinghouse. Incendiary bombs were dropped on Tokyo. The spring winds did a tragic amount of damage, burning basically the entire downtown area here. 120,000 people's souls were lost, countless injured, and you can see part of that day that still remains in a dent in this bridge.

01:28 John Daub: Here's what it looks like if you're walking around Tokyo. This is where one of the incendiary bombs fell and it ended up damaging the top of the bridge. And it wasn't until a couple of years ago that a bridge engineer came out publicly and said that this is what this was. This happened as a result of the incendiary bomb hitting it and damaging it. And of course the bridge itself is made out of steel—battleship steel. This metal that the bridge is made of is actually from battleships that Japan stopped making in the 1920s due to a naval treaty signed with the United States and England. The treaty limited Japan to a 5:5:3 ratio of battleships. With all of that steel left over, they decided to create this bridge, which makes it one of the strongest bridges I know of.

03:19 John Daub: In fact I have some pictures here to show you. Here's a historical picture of what the Edo era bridge looked like. You can see the people spilling into the river. Most of those souls were lost as a result of that. Very tragic event. This is what the bridge looked like during the Edo period from a woodblock print. It was a basic bridge that went up and down over the river and was wide enough underneath to allow the ships of the era to go through. Fast forward to the Great Kanto Earthquake—the bridge collapsed again. When they rebuilt it in the mid-1920s, they wanted to make sure that it would last forever.

04:04 John Daub: You can see here the construction going on of the bridge in the 1920s. There's the trolley car that goes across the bridge towards Monzen-Nakacho. You can see the old bridge on the right side there. It's just fascinating when you see the history behind this bridge. You have a greater appreciation for it—where it came from and why. Here's one of the bridge being built, the workers going over it, laying down the tracks as well for the train to go across and then traffic to go on the left and right of it. I guess there weren't a lot of cars back then. This is more in the 1950s—there were a lot more cars and you can see the train going across the center of it. No longer is it there but you can see now when I show you the bridge again you're gonna be able to really notice where that was.

05:09 John Daub: This last photo here I want to show you is the bridge. The opening of the bridge was with a Shinto ritual where they blessed the bridge and gave it a lot of spiritual charm because it had collapsed or burned and had been destroyed so many times in the last couple of centuries. These Shinto priests did it—I think it was 1925. Now when you look down the center of it you can see where the streetcar went. They could not change the dimension of the bridge, so now you have this black thing going across the middle where the trolley went. Interesting, isn't it?

06:22 John Daub: This is Eitaibashi right here in the center of your screen. I want to give you kind of a sky view of it—what it looks like today. It still keeps its form. Now the bridge was modeled after a bridge in Germany—Brücke von Remagen (Remagen Bridge)—which was bombed in World War II and is no longer in existence. Eitaibashi is one of the iconic bridges going over the Sumida River (隅田川，main river here in Tokyo). There are a lot of other really significant bridges that go across, like in all the major cities in the world—London Bridge, Tower Bridge. All of it is very historic when you know the history behind it. It's more than a bridge.

07:28 John Daub: Here's the bridge from the other side, this is from Chuo-dori (中央通り，Chuo Street) on the other side. You can see Skytree in the distance. It's the blue color—pretty iconic for Eitaibashi. It's in a lot of TV dramas. It was modeled after that bridge in Germany from the Friedens-Museum (Peace Museum). You can already see the shape of the structure crossing the Rhine River (ライン川). And you can really see the resemblance.

08:40 John Daub: Shout out to Bradshaw Studio—I really appreciate that, guys. And Eichen. Looks like a beautiful day. Yeah, we have wonderful blue sky here. Is there other structures that have World War II damage? Yeah, I'm making an episode on it. And this one is very limited. I'm making a main channel episode where I went with a guide around Tokyo, and I'm gonna show you. It's a fascinating episode. You can see the history of Tokyo and what is left of it from the firebombing of World War II. Because in the US we did study World War II quite a bit in history class, in particular in high school and college. But when you come to Tokyo and you see the other side of it, it is fascinating because then you start to understand how impacted the city was. I got questions from people why there are no old structures in Tokyo. The answer is a lot of it was just gone from World War II.

09:44 John Daub: And this is what we're looking for here on the right side—there's this damage. Now I'm doing this livestream in 720p, I apologize because the signal on this bridge is... I think the bridge repels 4G signal. So we have just a remnant of a signal. I'm not sure how good it's going to be, but I still think it's relevant to show you this live because whenever you do livestream, you kind of feel like you're here with me and I want you to feel the history behind this bridge. Every rivet in this now you've seen the pictures of it, I think has more significance.

10:27 John Daub: I love this picture and you can see this girl—this is in the 1950s—sliding down it. You wouldn't want to do that nowadays because there's just too much traffic. But back then it was kind of different. And I wanted to double-check the riveting here, but it looks like the rivets on this were different back then than they are today. So let's see—there it is today. I think it might've been on the other side, but I don't think you could slide on that because the rivets look like they're pretty harsh. If you were to do it, you need some cardboard or something.

11:19 John Daub: Again, the bridge starts from over here and you can see where the connection is right there between the streets. It's gone through a lot of reconstruction over the last decade actually. After the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011, March 11th, a lot of repairs on all of the bridges were done. And all of these were covered in particular before the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. They used a lot of the budget for fixing the city on the bridges and they made them more beautiful. The LED lights shine brighter, so to speak. I believe this is Kiyosu-bashi (清洲橋，Kiyosu Bridge) actually. This is going on to Shinkawa, which in itself is an island—the first island in Tokyo made in the Edo period. You can really see the rivets. It's been painted over and I believe it's always been this color of blue. It does look like a ship, doesn't it?

12:46 John Daub: The Doolittle Raid was here in 1942, not in Germany. All you have to do is watch Pearl Harbor the movie with Ben Affleck to figure that out. Doolittle Raid was a pretty dangerous feat. They launched off the Hornet in the Pacific with B-25s off the aircraft carrier—they made the run knowing that they wouldn't be able to return. Brave, brave men. And I could see those planes in Honolulu at the Pearl Harbor Museum, which I thought was fascinating.

13:36 John Daub: If you look at the picture on the left, you can see up above in the rafters up there that holds it together. In the middle, we'll be able to see that particular damage. I saw it before I started the livestream. I have to admit, I was kind of squinting. It's right there in the center because that doesn't have any reinforcements. You can see it a little bit from this side of the bridge looking towards Monzen-Nakacho.

16:35 John Daub: The signal on this side of the bridge is not good—sorry. That's why I'm doing it at 720p, so hopefully it can hold together a little bit. But I was able to find it—it's just up there. So were you able to see it? Did you see it? Or did the signal drop? Electromagnetic interference, probably.

17:52 John Daub: But I don't think that girl in the 1956 picture slid on either side. Or they've done some work to it that made it different because there's rivets on it now that didn't exist anymore. The signal shielding—I don't know what it is. Maybe there's some sort of weird interference going on here. Okay, I can see it from here. Do you see underneath the signal there? There's bending right here—right in the center of your screen. That's it. Sorry it's shaky—settle down a little bit. We can also get a better shot. So that's it right there in the center of your screen. Hopefully you can see this a little bit better. But that's where the incendiary bomb from 1945, March 9th and 10th, hit the bridge, damaging it on the top there. And that damage is still here today. It's one of the few reminders of what happened that day from World War II.

19:35 John Daub: I think unless you know where you're looking, it's really hard to find. Because this is what I saw when I got here—it's really hard to see it. So that's what the damage looks like. And it's once you see it, it's pretty obvious. But all these people going across here have no idea what exactly that is. And even for a very long time, when they were working on the bridge, they weren't sure what that damage was. A guy painting the bridge—he's not going to even say anything about it. The bridge is damaged—okay. But it was a bridge engineer who caught this. And it wasn't until recently that he made it public. And I was like, wow, really? So this bridge was damaged in World War II. And this is one of the few things that is still here. Because again, in the firebombing of 1945, all of this is just gone—this is completely flattened. The entire area on this side of the bridge, on this side of the city, from Shiodome right here, this island, and this way, it was mostly okay. But everything on this side here was just completely flattened up to Asakusa and Ueno. And then this side, especially Ryogoku where the sumo is held, everything is brand new, including the ships here.

21:15 John Daub: We have now spotted Space Boat—how cool is that? Yeah, this was before all of our times, except for maybe a very few people over the age of 80. And even then, they would have been kids. But it is very cool that the history still remains. And like, you really have to look for it. And I kind of spent the spring researching the war here in Tokyo, and have been spending time with people over the age of 80 at the Tokyo Raids and Firebombing Museum. The curator, Yoshida-san, has been helping me out, giving me some access to things to make a documentary on this, and it's just fascinating. There's also a documentary called Paper City, which is playing in select theaters around here, which is a fascinating look. What I'm going to do is a little bit different style. But both of them, I think it's important to remember what happened during the war in Tokyo, because it marks so much of the city in which I live in.

22:51 John Daub: Akihabara was flattened as well—destroyed, reduced to ashes. There's lots of ways that I see it in history books, but that's all now part of the city's history. So you can walk across this bridge—just don't bring your cell phone and try to livestream it. Eitaibashi is right here. And the next bridge over, Kiyosu Bridge, is also quite well made. And again, it was built after the treaty in the 1920s with the U.S. and England. I guess Japan really needed oil, so they made this treaty because the U.S. sanctions that the West had in place on Japan were really harsh. So Japan said, we're going to go our own way. But in hindsight, they went south to Indonesia and the Philippines looking for resources. If they had gone north to Sakhalin, which is much closer, and they'd won in the Russo-Japanese War, they would have found more oil than they needed. But they went the wrong way.

23:57 John Daub: I'm laughing now because it's kind of humorous, but if Japan had gone north instead of south to look for oil, they went for oil that they knew about, not oil that they later learned about. But Sakhalin, which is now under Russian control—wrongfully given to them at the end of World War II as a concession to stop the Soviet Union from entering the war against Japan—which is one of the reasons why a lot of people say that World War II ended. There's going to be a lot of debate with historians, but it wasn't the atomic bomb, so to speak. It was the fact that Russia was going to join the war and Japan was already decimated. It made a lot of sense to surrender to the United States instead of to the United States and Russia. It's interesting. We don't look enough back at World War II, I think. But if you're a fan of Ian Toll or some of the books that he's written, they go into an extraordinary amount of detail and it connects the US and Japan in that conflict. And from that came an amazing friendship, which we see today.

25:13 John Daub: Historically, I'm not going to talk about how other countries neighboring Japan feel, but as long as people are happy, they're still alive from that era, I can understand why there would be some really tough feelings about it. But there comes a part in life where you have to move on from that. One of the biggest issues that I have is that Tokyo—and this is not my opinion, these are the opinions of people that I've been talking to—there's a feeling that Tokyo was so focused on moving on to the future that they completely wanted to forget about the past. Meaning what had happened as a result of the firebombing—it killed what is said to be 120,000 people whose names are in a shrine in Yokoamicho (横網町). And that's all a result of a select few in the military that made really poor decisions. And they want recognition that this happened. There's no monuments really that have been erected by the city. The city has done very little. The war museum, the bombing raid museum, was set up by Saotome-san, who has recently passed away, on his own initiative with money that he had to raise. It was nothing or very little of it raised by the government.

27:01 John Daub: But Saotome-san, the more I hear about him as a man, the more I realize how great he was as a person, because a lot of people from that era are quite upset with the imperial family, with the city government—not the United States, mind you. They're upset with the Japan side and what has happened since and the lack of recognition from the government. This is from people that I talked to. It's also in the documentary called Paper City, which is fascinating. And even to this day, when I went on March 10th and the imperial family came to pay their respects, there were a lot of sour faces. You could see people's faces. A lot of people feel really sore about it—the generation in particular that was here and the children that had to live with it. A lot of them were kids at the time—six, seven, eight, nine, ten years old that are still alive today. Most of them that were in this were traumatized as a result of it.

28:09 John Daub: I talked with a professor—she's a veterinarian, retired now. But she was six years old when it happened. And she remembers so much of it because it's one of those events in your life that you never forget. But it had such a negative impact on her—it depressed her, it really changed her life until she hit around 60 years old. She didn't even want to talk about it. But by talking about it, she was able to overcome it. And now she talks to me about her story in an interview I did yesterday. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you—because I'm still emotionally impacted by what I saw, what I heard, and what I saw at the museum. It's just trauma. And she told me that a lot of the people her age that are still alive were kids. The oldest person that I interviewed was 16 at the time—he's now 94, Kobayashi-san. And he gave me a pretty descriptive, detailed look at what it was like inside the fire zone, in particular the next day and the sound of the B-29s going across here. So it's going to be a pretty interesting episode that's coming out at the end of next month.

29:34 John Daub: But you can still see the war damage right in the center on the right side. Yeah, it really is a fascinating look and seeing the history of it just right now. I'm going to be back here with my main camera and get some shots of it and talk a little bit about it. Any questions? Looking at the chat now. Any questions about Eitaibashi?

30:53 John Daub: March 9th and 10th were the days of the bombing. The aftermath, if you look in the museum, I don't want to talk about it. It's important to see this kind of stuff that happened because it's history. But one of the reasons I want to make that episode is because all those souls were lost and they need to be remembered. It needs to be remembered that something like that happened. It was more damage than Hiroshima, more damage than Nagasaki. And what happened with those bombs impacted people for the rest of their lives. In fact, it impacted multiple generations because of the radiation. But what happened on this day was just an awful thing too that I think history books don't even mention in the West. I don't see anything with Operation Meetinghouse. We hear about the bomb—we just glance over it. But Tokyo was just flattened. And it was flattened in particular with incendiary bombs which would be illegal today. But war is war and nobody blames the US. That was interesting to me as an American. And for me, living in Hiroshima was the same way. Most people are more upset with their own country.

33:44 John Daub: Weren't the Japanese people being starved by the demands of the government? It was not a good shape. But I talked with Kanae Daub's grandfather, who was 97 when he passed away, a lot. And he talked about—they didn't have a lot of food anyways. Poverty was very tough, in particular in the 1930s and 1920s. Very much like in the US, where they couldn't afford to eat white rice. So they would mix white rice with barley, mugi meshi (麦飯，barley rice), which you could still get today. Because of the flavor, the older generation finds it nostalgic. But they would fill the white rice with cheaper ingredients to make it more wholesome. Not a lot of vegetables, thus people were a lot shorter back then. Nutrition was bad. Even fishing was hard—which sounds strange to me, but fish was not that easy to get in the city. Just a different world back then.

35:03 John Daub: And the reason why I think it's important to look back on it is because we have to move on from it as well. As long as there's somebody alive that was impacted by what had happened, I can understand why there would be really tough feelings. No one alive can feel what somebody else feels having gone through a traumatic experience like that. I just know that the people of Japan did not know much about the stuff that was going on. Mr. Seichi Kanai's grandfather told me that he was in the army and in the Philippines on arrival. Everybody in his group was dead—he was the only one that survived. And he was in the jungle. The only thing he wanted to do was survive—he just hid for years. He didn't have a lot of food—he said that he ate his shoe. It was made out of leather. That's Kanae Daub's grandfather—ate his shoe in the Philippines to survive. He didn't want to do anything bad. And when the war was over, he surrendered and was taken back by the U.S. to Japan to Hiroshima. And got on a train and came back to Tokyo through Hiroshima. And he saw the damage from the atomic bomb. He said it was really bad. I'm surprised that he made it out alive. He was the only one to survive. If he hadn't survived, Kanae Daub wouldn't be here.

37:04 John Daub: But the atrocities—I've studied it. As long as there's a person alive, you have to understand that it's almost an impossible thing to forgive. And it is impossible to forget. The people did not know exactly what was going on here. In the end, it was blamed on a few people who made some really awful decisions. It's a deep topic. And now we have a generation that don't even really study this in school. If you ask the kids, they really don't care—they want to forget about it. Most of them don't want to be a world power. They just want to do their own thing. They don't care about politics. And I think that took it out of them. A lot of them don't even vote.

38:17 John Daub: I'm always fascinated by the history of Japan. Thank you for sharing the stories with us. Reasons why history should not be hidden—absolutely. I want to end with this. And I'm going to talk about it more in the next video—that we don't forget. Because we learn from history. A lot of the photos and stuff that we have that happened in Tokyo comes from the United States Army in particular. They were really good at taking pictures and documenting everything that happened, including the bombings. It's not something that Japan has any video of that we can find. A lot of it with Hiroshima, Nagasaki—all these things, the U.S. was very good at filming this and giving them to the museums in Japan to show what had happened during the reconstruction. And MacArthur—you have to give a lot of credit for the way he thought too when he came in for reconstruction. He treated people with respect, won them over, and created a democracy. And he was successful. It almost brings tears to my eyes. Imagine an occupying country here and the locals actually liked them. Of course there were fights and stuff, but they were very generous and very kind.

40:07 John Daub: There were stories—I remember my great uncle telling a story about him giving an egg to a kid. He was stationed in Hokkaido—he'd never seen anybody so grateful for just one egg. And I heard stories yesterday about how valuable eggs were after World War II. It was like gold to people to get a fresh egg. And when my great uncle did it, to him that left the biggest impact—the expression on that Japanese kid's face just for giving an egg to a kid. It's a pretty emotional topic for me after you've studied this and you've read it. The more I read about it, the more fascinating it is and the more I respect it. The more the city's past becomes a part of you too, and you become a part of the city with that as well.

42:00 John Daub: But the bottom line—they don't teach in the West about Operation Meetinghouse and what had happened here on March 9th and 10th. And I will in the main channel episode—it's not a political video. I just want you to know and see the remains of World War II in Tokyo and why there are no old buildings in this city. Why it was completely wiped out and why it's a new city. And with the 1964 Olympics, Tokyo no longer wanted to talk about the past. Tokyo even to this day does not want to talk about the past. Tokyo wants to focus on the future—which is a very good thing, but it's a very bad thing because there are still people here from the past and they don't feel like they've put it in the past. They just want to be recognized. And that's a whole different thing. And I think Paper City the documentary does a great job of looking into both sides of it. People are just looking for recognition—they're not even looking for money or reparations for losing businesses. Most people just want to be remembered, and it's all private right now—private organizations are doing it, nothing is done by the city of Tokyo, and that's a little sad.

43:50 John Daub: So if you're in Tokyo, come and stop by Eitaibashi now that you know a little bit of the history of it—I think you'll appreciate it a little bit more. It is basically a battleship—this is the steel bridge that would have been made into a battleship that is now a bridge, and one of the strongest ones that had almost no damage during the Great Tohoku Earthquake 13, 14 years ago now. Pretty incredible. Thanks for watching everybody—that was a lot longer when you start to talk about feelings and stuff like that, it can turn into a little bit longer of a livestream. But I'll see you in another one tomorrow—me and Peter von Gomm are planning to be in Ikebukuro, so you might want to go over in that area and stop by. I'll try to give you as much of a heads up before we start so you can get a You Found Me card if you're in the city. Bye everybody.