What sort of city is Tokyo, and how did the city we know today emerge? Tokyo Little House hosts exhibits that seek to present new visual perspectives on the city’s complex and textured history.

Tokyo is often called a city without history. Half the city was erased in the firebombing of 1945, and few symbolic buildings remain from centuries past. Yet in another sense, the very fact that a city as large as London and New York was reduced to ashes is an integral part of Tokyo’s history.

The ruins that stretched across the urban landscape 70 years ago marked the end of Tokyo as imperial metropolis and vanguard of Japanese modernity; it was also the beginning of the Tokyo we recognize today. We are pleased to host guest curator Yoichi Sato’s Tokyo Year Zero, an exhibit that evokes the origins of the modern city in the moments immediately after the war, when death and life intermingled in urban space just a few years before Tokyo Little House was built.

The Tokyo Year Zero project makes use of archival photographs captured in the months after the end of the war to offer a new perspective on the city’s postwar change and development. This exhibit presents photographs of the ruined landscape of the firebombed city taken by American occupation forces in 1945.

Fewer and fewer people remain who saw with their own eyes the Tokyo of more than seven decades ago—the city as a vast, ruined expanse. Some heard of this city from parents and grandparents, always as some variation of a story of revival from the ashes. But amid Tokyo’s incessant change, such stories are rarely told anymore.

What was Tokyo like after the defeat? Residents captured few photos of their ruined city, and I always struggled to picture the stories in my head. More than twenty years ago, I began searching for photographs taken by the American military at the U.S. National Archives, where I discovered a multitude of gazes upon the occupied city.

The fascination of the city lies in its temporal duality—present and past, destruction and creation layered atop one another. It is when we catch a glimpse through these layers that we encounter the true essence of the city—none other than the peculiar sensation of having touched the city itself.

Those who knew the landscape of the ruined city first-hand traced the constant changes of the postwar era upon these original outlines seared into their memory. They told us of Tokyo’s end, and its beginning. What can these photos tell us today? I hope that visitors are able to hear the stories contained within this scenery of 1945, and feel a trace of the city in this place that has witnessed the seven decades since.