JAJ46 Kanto Earthquake

It’s podcasting time! I’m jonathan isaacson, and this is Just Another Jerk, Dispatches from Japan, the podcast where I share thoughts about living in Japan, and, well, a lot of Japanese history. Because I like history. Subscribe to the podcast in all the usual places. Please rate the show, maybe give it a review and share it with a friend. Have you shared it yet? No. I’ll wait. Go ahead. Press pause, send a link to a friend. I can wait. I mean, this is a recorded medium, so...yeah. I can wait forever.

Today’s a shorter episode - largely because I want to get a story out in a timely fashion. Oh, yeah. If you couldn’t tell, this episode is another episode of the Everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-about Japanese-history series. So, let’s go.

September 1st, 1923 began pretty normally in the greater Kanto area. The Kanto area - think Tokyo and the surrounding area - was experiencing stronger than typical winds due to a major typhoon off the coast of the other side of the country, but it was summer in Japan, so typhoons really - pretty much par for the course.

The Saturday morning passed as normal. As the clocks reached 11 in the morning, kitchen hearths were readied for preparing lunch. Being 1923, many homes still used open flames to cook. As the noon hour approached, nearly every home in two of the country's largest cities - Tokyo and Yokohama - were just about ready to put lunch on the tables.

Suddenly, minutes before 12 o’clock, the earth began shaking. Violently. This was no ordinary earthquake.

Japan, located on the ring of fire, is one of the most seismically active countries in the world. Small earthquakes - magnitude 2 or 3 - occur literally every day. Larger earthquakes - magnitude 5 or so - are also incredibly common. But this day was different. This was a violent shaking that was causing the immediate collapse of hundreds of buildings. The British ship, the SS Dongola, was anchored off the coast of Yokohama when the shaking began. The captain would later record in his notes:

“At 11.55 a.m. ship commenced to tremble and vibrate violently and on looking towards the shore it was seen that a terrible earthquake was taking place, buildings were collapsing in all directions and in a few minutes nothing could be seen for clouds of dust. When these cleared away fire could be seen starting in many directions and in half an hour the whole city was in flames.”

Contemporaneous reports noted between 4 and 10 minutes of strong shaking. Officially, the shaking began at 11:58 am. Literal minutes before lunch. The epicenter of the earthquake was in western Kanagawa prefecture - not far from Odawara town. At the center, the quake registered a magnitude of 7.9. On the Mercalli intensity scale, which measures surface movement, some areas registered an eleven out of a possible 12 in terms of violence of ground movement. A level 11 shaking means, and I quote, “Few, if any, (masonry) structures remain standing. Bridges are destroyed. Broad fissures erupt in the ground. Underground pipelines are rendered completely out of service. Earth slumps and land slips in soft ground. Rails are bent greatly.”

Despite not being an undersea quake, a 12m tsunami struck parts of Kanagawa and Shizuoka. Landslides raced down the hills, sweeping entire communities as well as a full train - and a train station - out to sea. The shaking was so violent that the great Buddha at Kamakura - an enormous bronze sculpture weighing more than 120 tonnes - moved over 60 centimeters.

And due to the timing - literally minutes before lunch, the cooking fires in nearly every home very quickly turned into a great conflagration. The day’s strong winds, from the typhoon on the other side of the country - literally fanned the flames, making the fires spread much faster than they might have, in calmer weather conditions.

However, the conditions were what they were, and soon, firestorms were being whipped up, causing the tarmac of streets to melt. Many people, trying to flee the devastation, got stuck in the melting streets and died in the firestorms raging through Tokyo and Yokohama. In the worst case, nearly 40,000 people had fled to the Army Clothing Depot in the Yokoamicho district of Sumida, Tokyo. Unfortunately, the fires continued to rage, and at around 4pm, a fire tornado ripped through the clothing depot, burning some 38,000 people to death. The fires would rage on for another two days - the earthquake had ruptured nearly all water mains in the area, making firefighting nearly an impossible task.

In all, more than 100,000 - and possibly as many as 140,000 - people lost their lives in the earthquake and subsequent disasters.

Which is to say nothing of the massacre that followed. I’m not going to go into that today - I will cover this topic in more depth in a coming episode, I promise. Maybe even the next episode? But following the earthquake, anti-Korean sentiment got the better of a lot of Japanese people in the Kanto area - rumors of ethnic Koreans taking advantage of the the situation for financial gain, rumors of wells being poisoned, and other baseless rumors led to the deaths of at the absolute minimum 231 ethnic Koreans at the hands of Japanese mobs. The highest estimates I saw were as high as 10,000. Again, I’m not talking about it today, but the riots and police crackdown following the earthquake were also horrendous. And I will definitely get into the topic more very soon.

Also following the devastation of the quake, members of the government proposed moving the capital of the country elsewhere, though where I was unable to find. I don’t think those proposals got very far. It was decided that Tokyo should be rebuilt as a more modern city, a city that reaffirmed traditional Japanese values - because, yes, there were plenty of people who thought the earthquake was some sort of divine retribution for Japanese people becoming immoral and self-centered. Hmm. That record sounds familiar. But, yeah, following the 1923 earthquake, Tokyo was rebuilt into a truly modern city - with some seriously fucked up racist ethnic cleansing going on, but that got swept under the rug at the time. I won’t do the same, I promise.

But by the time the second Sino-Japanese war - the war that later morphs into the Pacific Theater of WWII - is in full swing, Tokyo is a thoroughly modern city. And then it gets leveled again by carpet bombing. Which is why, in the 1970s and 80s, Tokyo was this super modern, futuristic, almost, city. It had been leveled and rebuilt twice in only a few decades. But now, Tokyo is not this super, hyper-modern city. That was the image of Tokyo when I was a kid. Tokyo of today? Nah. Look to Shanghai. Kuala Lumpur. Singapore. Pretty much any of the emirates in the UAE.

But, yeah, 98 years ago today, as this podcast is released - Tokyo was shaken by one of the worst disasters in modern Japanese history. But it bounced back - albeit with some real ugliness showing its head. I kind of feel like there should be some big lesson in a story like this, but I’m not sure what exactly it should be. So I’ll just leave you to ponder that on your own.

That’s where we’ll end the story of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

Please remember to subscribe, rate and review the podcast wherever it is you cast your pods. This podcast is on most of the major platforms - Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora - probably some others. If it’s not on your favorite platform, let me know and I’ll look into getting it on that platform as well. You can find the twitter for this podcast @justanothercast. You can email the show at justanotherjerkpodcast@gmail.com. And you can find all that information on the website- tinyurl.com/jerkpod. That’s all for me. I’m Jonathan Isaacson, and I’m out. Peace.