Tokyocooney's Japan forum

These are kind of interesting. They're part of the Perry-Castañeda online map collection, and what I've linked to are 1:1250 maps of Japanese cities circa 1946. That's down close enough that large buildings such as Sugamo Prison (the current site of Sunshine City) are actually shown with a detailed footprint. You can find it here, a bit left of center:

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/japa ... 645-08.jpg


Here's the index of all the Tokyo maps:

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/japa ... tokyo.html

By the way, the grey hatched areas are those destroyed by wartime bombing. Check out Kawasaki or Omori to see just how extensive this could be.


Here's the full index of city maps. It's pretty complete, even Kawagoe is there:

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/japan_city_plans/

These are awesome! Thanks!
It's cool to see certain areas on the maps compared to Google Earth.
Also interesting, yet very sad, is the Hiroshima map detailing the bombed area.
It blows my mind how much detail they had on all the maps.

Don't mention it. Yes, I gather this would have been the series used for planning the air campaign. Things like the actual shapes of buildings or river bends were crucial to the aviators, that being long before the days of punching co-ordinates into the GPS.

I had a John Cleese "don't mention the war" moment once. I was running a lesson for a women's club, and we were discussing a newspaper article about women in various countries asked who they would put in the lifeboat if they were on the Titanic. Anyway, I casually tossed out the question of whether anyone had actually been in a life-threatening situation. One of the ladies began a story with: "When I was a child, one night a big fire was coming toward my house." I pretty quickly put 4 and 4 together and realized she was talking about one of the fire raids.

On a happier note, I find these interesting for looking at some of the places I've lived to see how much they've changed. I used to live in Itabashi (pretty close to where DallasinTokyo is, unless he's moved) and was interested to see how much of that area was still rice field on these maps.

Dallas in tokyo is now in montreal. I lived in motohasnuma which is Itabshi-ku dead central.

As for the titanic I defer to Erma Bombeck who said:

"Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, 'No, thank you,' to dessert that night. And for what! "

God I love her. Her and Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Parker. I wish they still made women like that.