YOKOAMICHO PARK

“[Yokoamicho] is a sacred place for the victims of the Great Kanto Earthquake...a place where we mourn those who died in 1923 – a place where we think about that disaster."

– Hashimoto Yoshiko

1923 | The Great Kanto Earthquake

Shortly after noon on September 1, 1923, a powerful earthquake struck Tokyo. Fires broke out across the city, especially in the low-lying areas around the Sumida River called “the Low City.” As the densely packed wood-and-paper structures of the Low City burned around them, people fled for open spaces near the river. Nearly 40,000 crammed into an open field on the banks of the Sumida--the site of a recently departed Army uniform depot. They carried children and hauled carts full of their belongings.

The wind blew sparks from the burning city into the crowd. At around 4 PM, a fire storm engulfed the depot site. In an instant, 38,000 people burned to death. The victims were cremated on-site and buried in a makeshift memorial.

Thereafter, the area was rebuilt as a memorial park. Yokoamicho Park opened on September 1, 1930: the seventh anniversary of the quake. A tomb was built for the 38,000 who died there, along with an additional 20,000 victims found elsewhere in the city. It was called the “Earthquake Memorial Hall.” The following year, a museum about the earthquake and the city’s reconstruction opened next door.

1973 | Korean Victims' Memorial

It wasn't until the 1970s that Tokyo made space for remembering the atrocity that unfolded in the quake’s aftermath. By 1923, Tokyo had morphed from a national capital into an imperial one. Recent years had seen an influx of immigrants from Japan’s colonies, and from Korea in particular.

After the earthquake, the Home Ministry sent a communique to local police stations warning that resident Koreans were planning a mass uprising. Newspapers claimed that Koreans were poisoning wells and committing arson, robbery, and rape. Other headlines warned that socialists were inciting Korean and Chinese immigrants to attack native Japanese people. For weeks, soldiers, police, and civilians roamed the streets killing anyone they believed to be Korean. They reminded an American missionary living in Yokohama of the Ku Klux Klan.

Kameido, a neighborhood just east of Yokoamicho, was one epicenter of the violence. A survey estimated that 89 people were murdered inside the Kameido Police Station alone. Of that number, 10 were prominent socialists known to local police from past labor protests. They were arrested by the police, brought to the station, and shot by members of the Army’s 13th cavalry brigade.

For decades, the city government made no memorial to the massacre. But in the early 1970s, city representatives from across the political spectrum organized a donation drive for a memorial at Yokoamicho Park. It was dedicated in 1973, on the fiftieth anniversary of Kanto Earthquake. Its inscription reads:

Amidst the confusion following the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923, more than 6,000 Koreans had their precious lives taken from them due to misguided conspiracies and rumor mongering. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the earthquake, we mourn the Korean victims from the bottom of our hearts. We believe that knowing the truth of this incident is key to never again repeating our sorrowful history, eliminating racial discrimination, respecting human rights, and building a grand path of neighborly friendship and peace. We hope the sincerity and dedication of the Japanese who transcended their differences to build this memorial strengthens the eternal friendship between the peoples of Japan and Korea.

Every year on September 1, a diverse community gathers at the memorial to remember the victims of the Kanto Massacre.

Sadly, the choice to build the memorial inside Yokoamicho Park–that is, to remember the Kanto Massacre merely as part of the larger tragedy of the earthquake–has enabled bad-faith actors to minimize it. The debate over how many people were killed in the Kanto Massacre has long been a lodestar for the Japanese right. For them, it has become an article of faith that the accepted death toll is inflated, leading many conservatives to deny the massacre even happened.

In March 2017, a conservative city rep named Furukawa Toshiaki took to the floor of the city assembly to criticize the memorial ceremonies at the Kanto Massacre Memorial. He objected to its organizers’ use of the word “massacre” as a “distortion of history.” Furukawa complained that Korean activists had seized on the disaster to commit atrocities, and that those atrocities justified the formation of so-called “self-defense groups.” Furukawa then called on Tokyo’s governor Koike Yuriko, to stop sending letters of condolence to the ceremony, as Tokyo governors have since 1973. A staunch conservative herself, Koike responded that she would “make an appropriate judgement.”

In 2017, a week before that year’s memorial ceremony, Koike held a press conference to announce that she would no longer send a letter of condolence to the Kanto Massacre memorial ceremony. Her statement read: “We express our condolences for all victims of the disaster, and so will refrain from issuing a separate letter of condolence.” When asked whether she believed the massacre happened, the mayor said only that she thinks there are “many historical interpretations of what happened.”

The Japan-Korea Council has observed that Koike’s strategy is to erase the Kanto Massacre by conflating its victims with the victims of the earthquake. For all the good intentions behind the 1973 memorial, its placement inside Yokoamicho Park plays into this deceit.

2001 | Tokyo Air Raid Victims Memorial

On March 10, 1945, 300 American planes rained incendiary bombs on Tokyo’s Low City, killing upwards of 100,000 people in a matter of hours. The commander of the raid, Curtis LeMay, later remarked that “the U.S. had finally stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile.”

Amidst the chaos, authorities resorted to burying the dead mass graves, much as they had in 1923. But this time, there would be no official tomb. No public mourning or remembrance. The U.S. Occupation instituted a media blackout on the Tokyo air raids. It also grew impatient with talks between the city and victim’s families about what to do with the mass graves.

In 1948, Lt. Commander William Bunce ordered Tokyo’s government to re-bury the dead inside the Earthquake Memorial Hall at Yokoamicho. The city quietly exhumed 105,400 bodies. 450 porcelain urns containing their ashes were placed inside Earthquake Memorial Hall. Thereafter, its name was changed from “Earthquake Memorial Hall” to “Tokyo Metropolitan Memorial Hall.”

In 1951, Yokoamicho began hosting memorial services every September 1 to mark the earthquake, and every March 10th to mark the air raid. Meanwhile, the city and national governments made no moves to memorialize the air raid. On the contrary, in 1965, Japan’s prime minister bestowed a medal on Curtis LeMay–the commander of the air raids who likened Tokyo and its people to a "manure pile"– in thanks for his help planning Japan’s new self-defense force.

It wasn’t until 1970 that public remembrance of the air raid began gaining steam. That year, survivors formed the “Society for Recording the Tokyo Air Raids.” The group successfully petitioned Tokyo’s governor, Minobe Ryokichi, to fund a multiyear campaign to collect survivor’s stories. This project inspired grassroots campaigns in firebombed cities across Japan. Survivors used their findings to organize local archives and museums.

In the late 1980s, this trend converged with Japan’s “peace museum” movement, which remembered Japan’s wartime atrocities alongside stories of domestic suffering. Tokyo activists and left-wing politicians pushed for a Tokyo Peace Museum, and a victims memorial outside Yokoamicho Park.

But the movement was stymied twice--first in the 1980s, and then again late in the nineties. In 1979, the socialist Governor Minobe was succeeded by the pro-corporate Suzuki Shunichi. Cary Karacas writes that, where Minobe sought to transform Tokyo “from a city that gives priority to industry to a city centered around people,” Suzuki sought to “transform Tokyo into a depoliticized global city known for its cultural amenities [and] attractiveness to capital.” Legacies of his administration include the shopping centers and office parks of Odaiba, and the convention halls of Tokyo International Forum.

But there was no place in Suzuki’s sterile vision for the raw remembrance demanded by the Tokyo Peace Museum project. It wasn’t the type of “cultural amenity” that endeared itself to capital, especially the American variety. But 1991 brought a glimmer of hope when left-wing parties retook the city assembly. His hand forced, Suzuki summoned a committee to design the Tokyo Peace Museum. Their proposed layout prefaced displays about the devastation of Tokyo with a large exhibit titled “The Path Leading to the Tokyo Air Raids,” which would foreground military atrocities during World War II. Although the proposal did not include a separate tomb for the remains at Yokoamicho, it did promise a cenotaph of some kind. The museum was slated to be built in Tsukuda, a riverside neighborhood in the midst of redevelopment.

Sadly, the entire proposal was shredded in 1996 under the austerity regime of a new governor, Aoshima Yukio. Instead, Aoshima proposed demolishing part of the Kanto Earthquake museum and grafting onto it a small museum about the Tokyo air raids. When a backlash ensued, the governor’s office offered to build the peace museum underground instead, beneath Yokoamicho Park. Activists denounced the plan, and renewed their calls for a museum and memorial outside Yokoamicho. Karacas tells us that the group was mainly led by “women who had either experienced the Great Tokyo Air Raid or lost family members in it.” Their activism provoked a conservative backlash similar to that which has befallen the Kanto Massacre memorial. In 1997, a conservative member of the city assembly argued that the peace museum plan, quote, “dishonored” fallen Japanese soldiers by portraying them as aggressors and not, as he had it, “liberators.”

In 1999, a new conservative majority cancelled the museum altogether. Instead, they moved to build a cenotaph inside Yokoamicho Park dedicated to the air raid victims. Today, the remains of the air raid victims still reside within the Tokyo Metropolitan Memorial Hall. Completed in March 2001, the Tokyo Air Raid Victims Memorial contains only a name register of the victims housed in the memorial hall.

Its inscription reads, in part, as follows:

This monument was erected so that the memory of those air raids and their victims will not fade but live on to remind succeeding generations that today’s peace and prosperity was built on the sacrifice of many precious lives.

And so, in the end, we are left with a memorial remarkably suited to Suzuki’s “global city.” The Tokyo Air Raid Victims Memorial re-invents the most destructive bombing in human history as a sacrificial rite, an offering of blood on the altar of our world of shopping malls, office parks, and convention centers. The memorial could not accomplish this but for its lack of context. The only reason it does not have context is because it has been shoehorned into another memorial.

As air-raid survivor Hashimoto Yoshiko said in 1998, Yokoamicho Park is “a sacred place for the victims of the Great Kanto Earthquake. It is a place where we mourn those who died in 1923 – a place where we think about that disaster.”