In 1960, on the 37th anniversary of the quake, the government declared September 1 an annual "Disaster Prevention Day". Stunned survivors of the earthquake, tsunami, and firestorm looked for an explanation or a scapegoat, and the target of their fury was the ethnic Koreans living in their midst. One of the newly deceased has a memory of being in the woods after the earthquake. According to some estimates, the death toll was as high as 6,000. The smiles vanished, remembered Ellis M. Zacharias, then a young U.S. naval officer, who was standing on the pier when the earthquake hit, and for an appreciable instant everyone stood transfixed by the sound of unearthly thunder. Moments later, a tremendous jolt knocked Zacharias off his feet, and the pier collapsed, spilling cars and people into the water. In short, the new Tokyo would be the model high modernist city that could serve as a blueprint for all future urban renewal projects in Japan. Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake of 1923, also called Great Kanto earthquake, earthquake with a magnitude of 7.9 that struck the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area near noon on September 1, 1923. In the vicinity of the badly damaged Manseibashi Train Station in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. %PDF-1.6
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The Great Kanto Earthquake, also sometimes called the Great Tokyo Earthquake, rocked Japan on Sept. 1, 1923. Following the devastation of the earthquake, some in the government considered the possibility of moving the capital elsewhere. In reconstructing the city, the nation, and the Japanese people, the earthquake fostered a culture of catastrophe and reconstruction that amplified discourses of moral degeneracy and national renovation in interwar Japan.[49]. [citation needed]. [35] Anti-Korean sentiment was heightened by fear of the Korean independence movement. A good idea of the tremendous devastation in Tokyo wrought by earthquake and fire. J.H. Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the plot takes place in a way station for those who have just died. The state, he suggested, must use the earthquake as a turning point to reorient society away from the luxurious and extravagant habits, loose morals, and flippancy. [33][34] The Home Ministry declared martial law and ordered all sectional police chiefs to make maintenance of order and security a top priority. At that time Yuzuki was in Tokyo visiting a friend, causing Tamahiko to worry, and follow her to Tokyo. Within hours of the catastrophe, rumors spread that Korean immigrants were poisoning wells and using the breakdown of authority to plot the overthrow of the Japanese government. (2020, August 28). 1923 earthquake and tsunami centered in southeast Honshu, Japan. [48] Proposed sites for the new capital were even discussed. Your Privacy Rights Fortunately, this area did not suffer from fire. It lasted between 4 and 10 minutes. [15] Other mechanism and fire whirl dynamics may exist. About 700 Chinese, mostly from Wenzhou, were killed. The earthquake hit just a few minutes before noon on September 1, measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale. Ethnic Koreans were massacred after the earthquake. Rather than unite the political establishment, the earthquake and reconstruction process widened many of the underlying political and ideological fissures that scarred the landscape of interwar Japan. [44] Socialists such as Hirasawa Keishichi[ja] (), anarchists such as Sakae sugi and Noe It, and the Chinese communal leader, Kiten[ja] (), were abducted and killed by local police and Imperial Army, who claimed the radicals intended to use the crisis as an opportunity to overthrow the Japanese government. A fire whirl can reach up to 2,000F (1,090C). On September 2, 1923, he assumed the position of Home Minister and soon thereafter became President of the Reconstruction Institute. On the way, the 1923 earthquake strikes, damaging the train and causing a huge fire in the city. 650 feet tall, almost 1,000 feet across, and spinning at a velocity of 125 miles per hour-how did the devastating dragon twist of 1923 come to be? The importance of obtaining and providing accurate information following natural disasters has been emphasized in Japan ever since. This, they believed, could be secured through the adoption of proactive urban planning and the expansion of extensive social welfare facilities. Educator Takashima Heizabur encouraged families to foster a sense of diligence and thrift at home and to eat only brown rice on the first of each month to commemorate the earthquake disaster. ", "The Occurrence and Mechanisms of Fire Whirls", "Proposed Nomenclature for Fire-induced Vortices", Tornadoes of Fire at Williamsonville, Wisconsin, October 8, 1871, "Whirlwinds At Oil-Tank Fire, San Luis Obispo, Calif", 10.1175/1520-0493(1926)54<161:WAOFSL>2.0.CO;2, "Intense Atmospheric Vortices Associated with a 1000 MW Fire", 10.1175/1520-0477(1980)061<0682:IAVAWA>2.0.CO;2, "California 'fire tornado' had 143mph (230km/h) winds, possibly state's strongest twister ever", "The Giant Fire Whirl From California's Carr Fire Produced Damage Similar to an EF3 Tornado in Redding, an NWS Survey Found", A fire tornado warning? The newly deceased will take their happiest memory with them into the afterlife. Often relayed by refugees, some stories suggested that Mt. Ministers of state who guarded their administrative budgets and responsibilities with fierce determination were thus pitted against a wide-ranging reconstruction program for fear that this would reduce the future budgetary health of the bureaucracies under their jurisdiction. Starting in Yokohama, rumors circulated suggesting that bands of lawless Koreans had set fires, looted shelters, shops, and vacant homes, and poisoned wells throughout the Kant region. Transforming perception into reality required two key ingredients, namely political authority and money. Writing in journals, both popular and academic, as well as in books and in newspapers, Fukasaku freely admitted that the earthquake presented a unique opportunity by which people could interpret what was natures inevitability as moral inevitability and use it for social, political, and ideological ends.14 When we look back upon the state of the popular mind of our society before the earthquake, he wrote, we can understand that interpreting the disaster as a deliberate divine plan (kami no keikaku ) was not absurd at all. He concluded:15. Violence ensued. The city of Yokohama was hit even worse than Tokyo was, although both were devastated. The radio man flashed the news across the sea at the speed of sunlight, reported the New York Times, to tell of tremendous casualties, buildings leveled by fire, towns swept by tidal wavesdisorder by rioters, raging fire and wrecked bridges.. After a brief time there, she's sent back to the already destroyed Tokyo, and she, alongside her soon-to-be love interest Seiji Horie and two young boys named Hideo and Kenichi, is taken in by a friend of the late Takao, Dr. Oikawa. In contrast to London, where typhoid fever had been steadily declining since the 1870s, the rate in Tokyo remained high, more so in the upper-class residential northern and western districts than in the densely populated working-class eastern district. Roving bands of Japanese prowled the ruins of Yokohama and Tokyo, setting up makeshift roadblocks and massacring Koreans across the earthquake zone. A fire whirl or fire devil (sometimes referred to as a fire tornado) is a whirlwind induced by a fire and often (at least partially) composed of flame or ash. [55], Maurice Tourneur's 1924 silent film Torment has an earthquake in Yokohama in its plot, and uses footage of the Kant earthquake in the film.[56]. Type 2: Stable or transient, downwind of burning area. Messervey, letter dated March 5, 1924. And the quake may have emboldened right-wing forces at the very moment that the country was poised between military expansion and an embrace of Western democracy, only 18 years before Japan would enter World War II. A map detailing where the firestorms erupted and the areas that they consumed can be found in Tokyoshi. History of Japanese Organized Crime, the Yakuza, Behind the Accounts of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, J.D., University of Washington School of Law, B.A., History, Western Washington University. 5 File Number 131-600, "Collection of 1923 Japan earthquake massacre testimonies released", "Ethnic Korean filmmaker ends 30-year hiatus to tackle massacreThe Asahi Shimbun", "Sewage Disposal and Typhoid Fever: the Case of Tokyo 19121940", "The Big Ones by Lucy Jones | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books", "The Great Earthquake and Fire in Japan: An Interpretation", "The 1923 Kant earthquake reevaluated using a newly augmented geodetic data set", 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake Fire Tornado Video, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1923_Great_Kant_earthquake&oldid=1141622422, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Japanese-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2012, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2012, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2017, Articles with trivia sections from August 2020, Commons category link is defined as the pagename, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Aldrich, Daniel P. "Social, not physical, infrastructure: the critical role of civil society after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. [46], Amidst the mob violence against Koreans in the Kant Region, regional police and the Imperial Army used the pretext of civil unrest to liquidate political dissidents. Type 3: Steady or transient, centered over an open area adjacent to an asymmetric burning area with wind. [11] A strong typhoon centered off the coast of the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture brought high winds to Tokyo Bay at about the same time as the earthquake. Then came fires, roaring through the wooden houses of Yokohama and Tokyo, the capital, burning everythingand everyonein their path. *Tdyjd+e&).V[&Ytk8TC1Su9Bee*FdMKm fsLa-R5"kYL5%Y~1uvR&`Z[Rw?$/`[=-{Uzb45RkXb-oM[-_iO)9M? ", Hunter, Janet, and Kota Ogasawara. The unfinished battlecruiser Amagi was in drydock being converted into an aircraft carrier in Yokosuka in compliance with the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. Then there was Taki Yonemura, chief engineer of the government wireless station in Iwaki, a small town 152 miles northeast of Tokyo. Although both were devastated, the city of Yokohama was hit even worse than Tokyo. [38] Independent reports said the number of dead was far higher, ranging from 6,000 to 10,000. ThoughtCo. It was the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history. "The Great Kanto Earthquake in Japan, 1923." In 2006, he received a National Award for Australian University Teaching from the Carrick Institute. One individual who exemplified the spirit of post-disaster opportunism was Got Shinpei, a former mayor of Tokyo who had gained urban planning and administrative experience in Japans colonies of Taiwan and along the South Manchurian Railway. 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