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Catastrophe, Opportunism, Contestation: The Fractured Politics of Reconstructing Tokyo following the Great Kantô Earthquake of 1923

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2006

J. CHARLES SCHENCKING
J. CHARLES SCHENCKING
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Abstract

‘Earthquake and fire destroyed the greater part of Tokyo. Thoroughgoing reconstruction needed. Please come immediately if possible, even if for a short stay.’ So cabled Viscount Gotô Shinpei, former mayor of Tokyo (1920–1923) and current Home Minister to his long-time friend and Director of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, Charles A. Beard. Six days earlier, on 1 September 1923, an earthquake with an estimated magnitude between 7.9 and 8.2 devastated much of Tokyo and the surrounding Kantô region. The quake and the resulting fires, conflagrations that burned for over two days, destroyed nearly 70% of all structures in Tokyo, inflicted damage with a monetary cost upwards of 5.5 billion yen, killed more than 120,000 citizens, and rendered just over 1.5 million people homeless: it was an urban catastrophe surpassed in scope only by the devastation wrought by aerial bombing during the Second World War. The Kantô Daishinsai was Japan's most deadly, economically costly, and physically destructive natural catastrophe in history. Within a world history context moreover, the 1923 earthquake was one of the most devastating and disruptive natural disasters of the 20th century, yet it is also one of the least studied.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , October 2006 , pp. 833 - 873
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Generous funding from the United States Department of Education, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Australian Research Council made the research upon which this article is based possible. I would also like to thank Ms. Hirata Sachiko of the Tokyo Institute of Municipal Research, and the staff of Waseda University Library for assistance they provided during my research in Japan.