This photograph, from a personal album compiled by an American serviceman during the postwar occupation of Japan, shows the ruins of an industrial coking or chemical plant, its rows of furnace doors and towering smokestack left standing amid charred timber and rubble. Facilities like this were prime targets of the U.S. strategic bombing campaign against Japanese war industry in 1944–45. Photographs such as this one, taken by occupation personnel touring the country in the years afterward, document the scale of industrial destruction that shaped Japan's postwar reconstruction. Project: 218332