From wikipedia: "Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city's output in half."
If a single raid in Germany had cut the total Ruhr's capacity by 50%, allied bombers would have tried to do that every day of the war.
That Japanese did this decentralization even though it cost them the ability to scale up their production. This is why Japanese production completely collapsed as the war moved forward, unlike the Germans, Soviets and Americans who all had their production skyrocket throughout the war. That's how committed they were to using their population as shield to protect it from the inevitable bombers.
So tragic it was - but let's remember that this program was deliberate by the Japanese leaders - a deliberate effort to use their own population as civilian shield to continue their rape and massacre of the rest of Asia.
I think the first I heard of the Tokyo firebombing during WWII was in the Errol Morris documentary: "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara".
Robert McNamara was an officer under Curtis LeMay. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment. [2]
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Mafia-Story-Set-War/dp/02415...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#In_The_Fog_of_W...
Another interesting viewpoint is taken by the below Foreign Policy article "The Dangerous Illusion of Japan’s Unconditional Surrender"
A restive public and increasingly assertive political leaders questioned if victory, defined as Japan’s unconditional surrender, could be achieved at a tolerable cost. The atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war against Japan cut short that debate and produced swift decision where none had seemed likely. That sudden reversal of fortunes obscured for later generations the extent to which U.S. strategy had been unhinged by Japanese resistance and the splintering of unity at home. It also made the ceremony in Tokyo Bay seem inevitable and reproducible.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/13/vj-day-the-dangerous-il...
By our own army's admittance, we conducted similar bombing of basically every North Korean city and town. We dropped 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan, 635,000 tons on North Korea.
Japanese construction was uniquely suited to the creation of “firestorms”, and the vast majority of the effect of US bombing Japan is WW2 was caused not by the bombs themselves, but through the fires set by them.
>We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too."
Learning about Japan, go to something like The Pacific War Trilogy by Ian Toll. It is new and well researched with lots of original research.
Hell, if anything, Toll and Gladwell reinforce each others' point. Toll also goes on to explain that the same thing that happened to Tokyo happened in Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, and pretty much every other major Japanese city.
https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/the-bomber-mafia-a-drea...
Shiro Ishii, the leader of Unit 731, among them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirō_Ishii
> there was no international treaty or instrument protecting a civilian population specifically from attack by aircraft at the time
reference
https://web.archive.org/web/20130425044944/http://www.icrc.o...