A picture of peace and calm, children play in a sandbox outside the Ireido temple, their laughter mixing with the sweet smell of incense in the cool air of late winter.
Fifty years ago, the spot was at the center of one of the most horror-filled nights of World War II: the firebombing of Tokyo.The world remembers the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which climaxed intensifying U.S. air and land attacks designed to end a war that began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But this week, the Japanese capital recalls its own descent into hell in the early hours of March 10, 1945.
"It was just after midnight when I was awakened by the sound of the B-29s," said Katsumoto Saotome, who was a child of 12 at the time. "By the time I looked outside, the flames were already raging and spreading everywhere."
For the next several hours, 334 American bombers dropped more than 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs. By dawn, Tokyo was an inferno.
Fanned by winds created by its own flames, the firestorm razed an area of roughly 16 square miles - one fifth of the city. It was the war's deadliest air raid, outstripping the carnage 27 days earlier when British and American bombers produced a firestorm in Dresden, Germany.
Estimates of the death toll in Tokyo run from 83,000 to 197,000.
One million people were left homeless by the attack, which destroyed working-class areas in northeast Tokyo and left huge swaths of burned-out blocks in landmark neighborhoods like the Ginza district.
"My family lost our house, everything," said Saotome. "But by dawn, we realized we were lucky. That's when we reached the river and saw the water thick with corpses. It was terrible."
Saotome, who has dedicated his life to documenting the bombing's effects, says he believes about 100,000 people died that night, with 10,000 more killed in later air raids before Japan's surrender on Aug. 16, 1945. He agrees the precise number may never be known.
Because it was carried out with conventional weapons - mostly incendiary bombs and napalm - the Tokyo raid has long been seen as a historical footnote to the unleashing of a shocking new weapon, the atomic bomb.
There is little doubt, however, that the Tokyo firestorm caused roughly the same number of immediate deaths as the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and more than the total number killed three days later in the bombing of Nagasaki, roughly 70,000.