A Brief History of the Disaster
As illuminating as the photographs and other materials from the Reynolds Collections are, it seemed to us as we were working on the site that it would be helpful to provide some historical context for the Collection, and the images it contains. What follows is a brief account of "what happened," in three parts.
The first part of that account deals with the seismic event itself, the second part with the event's effects on the built environment and the people who inhabited it, and the third touches very quickly on the man-made disaster(s) that followed.
Japan sits atop or in close proximity to the congruence of three major segments of the earth's lithosphere, the Philippine plate, the Pacific Plate, and the Eurasian plate. These segments are in motion, but not in the same direction, and not at the same speeds. Shortly before noon on September 1, 1923, along a fault extending roughly northwest by Southeast in Sagami Bay, parts of these plates slipped past each other. The Philippine plate is estimated to have moved as much as three and a half meters horizontally as well as vertically: parts of the Miura peninsula were thrust vertically upwards by as much as 8 meters initially, before subsiding over many days to an elevation a meter and a half or so higher than it had been on the morning of September 1. The magnitude of the earthquake is estimated to have been 8.3 on the Richter scale.
The ocean floor under the bay was also largely reconfigured by the shift, and part of the energy released by what had happened generated tsunami. The waves that reached Kamakura and swept away many swimmers there were reported to have been some five meters high, while those that struck Atami and caused massive damage there were reported to have reached heights of 13 meters.
On land, the energy released by the slippage had a violent effect on manmade structures throughout the Kanto plain. The damage caused directly by the earthquake itself, by the violent shaking of the ground, tended to be most pronounced in places where the soil was not underlay with substantial bedrock. Much of Tokyo's so-called Low City rests on such soil.
The effects on the built environment from the seismic event itself, and this is the second part of the description, were substantial, in that in many communities in the vicinity of the quake, few buildings were left habitable. Most of the casualties, however, and the massive scale of the destruction more generally, were the result of the fires that began soon after the quake ended, and continued to burn for several days. Yokohama, and most especially parts of Tokyo, were swept by firestorms, some of which may have gotten their start from lunchtime cooking fires, but many of which almost certainly originated in factories, industrial sites, laboratories and other such settings.
By the time the fires were contained, 90 percent of the buildings in Yokohama were damaged or destroyed, and an estimated two-fifths of the buildings in Tokyo had burned to the ground, leaving about half the population homeless.
Casualty figures are of course estimates, but they suggest that 110,000 people — roughly 2.5 percent of the population of the Tokyo metropolitan district or 4 percent of the residents of the city itself — were killed or missing. Levels of devastation varied from neighborhood to neighborhood. Only about one half of one percent of the population of Akasaka ward were casualties, while Honjo, the largest of all the Tokyo wards, 22 percent, or more than one in five, were killed or missing.
To the deaths caused by collapsing buildings, tsunami and fire we must also add the organized killings in the aftermath of the quake by Japanese civilians, police and the military of Koreans, Chinese, labor and political activists, and others, in a wave of violence that began on September 1 and went on for some time. This is the third element of what happened. These killings were fueled by rumors that Koreans resident in the Kanto area had risen up, and were carrying out acts of arson, rape and the poisoning of wells. The government's response to these rumors, at least initially, was to facilitate their spread, to organize and in some instances to arm local vigilante groups, and to instruct them to take whatever measures were necessary to protect their communities. While there are instances in which citizens and the police appear to have limited their actions to incarcerating Koreans, in many instances those people who could be identified as Korean, or merely suspected of being Korean, were murdered. The police would later estimate that some 231 Koreans had been killed in this manner, although most scholars place the total at somewhere between 6000 and 8000 people killed.
The post-quake violence also took the lives of many labor and political activists. In what became known as the Amakasu Incident, a military police officer and troops under his command arrested and murdered Osugi Sakae, perhaps the nation's most visible political activist and outspoken anarchist, his companion and fellow activist Itō, and their young nephew. Elsewhere in the city, more than a dozen labor leaders were "disappeared" in the Kameido Incident, it was later learned that the labor activists had been incarcerated buy the police, and subsequently killed by troops.
Some of those involved in the violence were eventually arrested and tried, but not many. The police arrested between 400 and 600 on charges associated with vigilante violence. Of those prosecuted, only a handful served time in prison.
So here is one narrative of "what happened." One of the roles of this collection, however, is suggest how insufficient such a description ultimately is, and to help us wonder, collectively, how to construct a more meaningful and useful one.
— Kerry Smith, Associate Professor of History, Brown University