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The Wind Blowing Through the City of Rubble: 1945 to 1971 War severs the city's time in an instant. Houses burned down by air raids, collapsed walls, shattered tiles, charred wood, and metal fragments accumulate on the streets alongside memories of daily life. This was waste entirely different from ordinary household garbage—heavy, bulky, and with nowhere to go. Immediately after defeat, Tokyo was shrouded in a silence called rubble, with no prospect of its disposal. The city sought to rise again, yet beneath its feet lay mountains of material too vast to handle. As people returned, commerce restarted, and daily life regained its breath, household waste surged. Daily refuse piled atop the rubble. The postwar city bore the dual burden of war-damage debris and household waste simultaneously. Labor, vehicles, and fuel were scarce, and incineration facilities were insufficient. Collection stalled, leading to widespread dumping and open piles, causing foul odors and pest infesta
tions. Garbage became not merely an unpleasant nuisance, but a public health crisis itself. The city's reconstruction began with the struggle against waste.

This situation eventually led to the reclamation of Tokyo Bay. The idea of creating land by filling it with rubble and waste was also a means to advance reconstruction and expansion simultaneously. However, when kitchen waste was dumped into the landfill before processing capacity could catch up, foul odors, massive fly infestations, and even spontaneous combustion caused by gas became serious problems. Yumenoshima was a place where the weaknesses of the postwar waste management system surfaced in a different form. The material debt left by the war erupted again in another part of the city after more than a decade. This experience spurred institutional reforms. The Sanitation Act was enacted in response to the postwar sanitation crisis, and its framework was later updated to the Waste Management and Public Cleansing Act during the subsequent period of high economic growth. The garbage problem began as an emergency arising from war, expanded riding the waves of reconstruction
and economic growth, and eventually led to conflicts within the city. The so-called Garbage War of 1971 was one such outcome. Friction over the siting and burden of treatment facilities created new tensions within the city. The relationship between war and garbage is not merely a story of cleanup. War damage severed the city's material cycles, generated waste exceeding processing capacity, caused sanitation problems, led to landfill environmental issues, and ultimately forced the reorganization of legal systems and urban policies. The mountains of rubble would eventually become incinerators, power plants, and the foundation for the concepts of sorting and recycling. At the starting point lay the image of postwar cities confronting their lost garbage amidst the winds blowing through the burnt ruins.