Divine Retribution

While rescue workers continue to dig people from the rubble of a large earthquake in eastern Turkey, the catastrophic combination of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan this past March 11 remains fresh in the minds of many as that country continues to struggle with resulting problems. It is made visible by the ongoing repair of nuclear power plants still in a fragile state, still a threat, and the thousands of people yet unable to return to their homes. Such disasters teach big lessons about how we live, but one time is not necessarily enough to make us invulnerable to divine retribution.

On September 1, 1923 at two minutes before noon, a devastating earthquake hit the densely populated area of Tokyo and Yokohama. The shocks rattled both cities at 7.9 on the Richter scale and set loose a forty-foot high tsunami, with a series of towering waves sweeping away thousands of people. At the time the first shocks hit, charcoal stoves in most homes were being used to prepare midday meals. The tremor scattered coals and fires, and fanned by a steady breeze spread quickly to become raging firestorms with deadly cyclones of superheated air from which most of the oxygen had been burned. In the Tokyo area of Honjo alone 38,000 died of suffocation.

140,000 people lost their lives—58,000 of them in Tokyo. Fire had long been a major threat in Japanese cities, the typical house of the time a light building with a wooden tile roof, built close to other houses with little empty space between. With no place to escape most victims suffocated or burned in the fires. Seventy to eighty percent of both Tokyo and Yokohama was destroyed. Writing for Trans-Pacific magazine, Henry W. Kinney painted this picture…

‘Yokohama, the city of almost half a million souls, had become a vast plain of fire, of red, devouring sheets of flame which played and flickered. Here and there a remnant of a building, a few shattered walls stood up like rocks above the expanse of flame, unrecognizable…It was as if the very earth were now burning. It presented exactly the aspect of a gigantic Christmas pudding over which the spirits were blazing, devouring nothing. For the city was gone.’

Martial law was enforced by 35,000 troops. Among those in power at the time, certain elements took advantage of the confusion to kill ‘suspicious’ Koreans, eliminate leftist radicals and murder ten labor union activists. These deaths exemplified the breakdown of order among those sworn to uphold it. In his book Yokohama Burning, Joshua Hammer suggests that the earthquake accelerated Japan’s drift toward militarism and war. With conservative elites already nervous about democratic forces emerging in society, the earthquake presented an opportunity to reverse some of the liberal tendencies. In the months and years following the disaster there was a sizable increase in right-wing patriotic groups which possibly laid the groundwork for eventual fascism. Historians have agreed that it was this great earthquake of 1923 and its devastation that gave voice in Japan to those who believed Western decadence had invited divine retribution.

Trains crowded with passengers were thrown from their tracks as depicted here by an unknown artist.

A tidal wave sweeping in from Sagami Bay prefigures the ruin that hit northeast Japan eighty-eight years later.

The first three woodblock prints, from top to bottom:

• Kyôryo no ensho (Burning Bridge in Honjo) by Hamada Nyosen. An estimated 44,000 people died when they sought refuge near Tokyo’s Sumida River in the first few hours. They were immolated by a freak pillar of fire called a “dragon twist.”

• Bahitsu no sanka (Tragedy of Horses) by artist Hamada Nyosen.

• An especially evocative 1925 woodcut by Takashima Unpo showing Tokyo’s Ueno district ablaze—In the words of a Jesuit priest who witnessed the calamity, “Each gust of wind gave new impulse to the fury of the conflagration.”

All Shook Up

Seeing the headlines on Friday morning, making my way in a dazed state through the CNN reports and filmed disaster of a devastating earthquake in Japan, concern for friends and all affected people was an immediate concern. Pictures and reports were horrible, but the worst of those were from northeastern Japan, a good distance from Tokyo. The city looked badly rattled but without the catastrophic collapse and inundation of Sendai 300 miles north and near the quake’s epicenter. Continuing to read the incoming reports it was hard to stop the thought of what if…? One year ago today I was preparing to leave Japan. With departure imminent, the house was more than usual in a muddle of sifting, sorting and unsecured piles of everything from furniture to knickknackery. What if an earthquake of 8.9 magnitude had hit Japan at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2010—what would I have seen?

With classes still in session ongoing tremors trigger an alarm recognizable by all as a signal to evacuate the buildings and move away to a pre-determined distance and location. Because of the severity and continuance of the tremors—only 5.0 in Tokyo, three hours south of the epicenter—students and staff are instructed to return home either by bicycle or on foot without returning to the school buildings. All trains have been automatically stopped so those without bicycles—about fifty percent—have no choice but to walk home, be it near or far. Most students have cell phones but service is down and they are like everyone else, unable to contact family and friends for the present. For me the walk home is eighty minutes, much of it through areas free of traffic and buildings. Everywhere people are out on streets and sidewalks, even strangers are talking, commiserating, offering help or whatever is needed. It is a time when all come together without the smallest thought of discrimination or reserve.

In Kugayama, approaching my apartment building I find five or six of the residents out front and I stop to talk with them, to ask for news or about conditions inside the building. Much of the dramatic description and rolling eyes I put off as exaggeration and head up the stairs to my third floor apartment. The greatest worry is an eighteen gallon aquarium, the horrible thought of it knocked down and smashed with a flood of water and tropical fish. Opening the door and looking in is an anxious moment, but the indoor scene shows less collapse than expected. The fish are fine, but there in the middle of the kitchen floor lay the shards of several irreplaceable old Japanese dishes and bowls. The top of the paulownia chest of drawers is a jumble of collapsed figures and trifles, two CD cases have tipped over spilling their cargo into a hash of plastic and glossy covers. A mirror has fallen to leave shards of bad luck on the living room carpet and a reading lamp leans awkwardly over a reading chair, saved from a crash by the cushioned arm. I take a few deep breaths, relieved that it’s not as bad as my imagination had painted. But I have no electricity and no water, no telephone and no Internet. For the time being talk with neighbors will have to serve to keep me posted on conditions in a shaken but intact city. Easily the worst earthquake in my experience but in Tokyo at least we’ve been spared.

News reports have mentioned more than once that Friday’s earthquake in Japan was the worst in a hundred years. Some truth to that but many are forgetting that at noon on September 1, 1923 the Tokyo area was rocked by a cataclysmic earthquake that killed over 100,000 people in the city alone, with 570,000 homes destroyed and 1.9 million left homeless. The Great Kantô Earthquake of 1923 hit with a force of 7.9 but conditions made it a disaster of biblical proportions. At that time all homes as well as many of the city’s buildings were constructed of wood, an extremely fragile structural base. The quake hit at an hour when many were preparing lunch over open fires. The spread of fire was an immediate threat and to add a big measure of ill fortune, a typhoon was blowing from the north fanning the flames into a firestorm which trapped many in melting tarmac, burning them where they stood. 38,000 died in a huge clothing depot when the fire induced something called a fire tornado. But in looking back at that disaster we can see that preventive measures were nonexistent, buildings and planning much different from the architecture and infrastructure of Tokyo in March of 2011.

Modern Tokyo is a city designed with earthquakes uppermost in the mind of civic engineers and architects. An earthquake with the power of Friday’s temblor is certainly not anything that Tokyo or any other large city can ignore, but the chances of loss in both life and property on the scale of 1923 are unlikely today. While it may be true that twenty-four hours after an 8.9 earthquake 300 miles distant, four million homes in Tokyo remain without power and while trains sit unmoving and people are still finding their way home, there is great relief in the small number of human casualties today in Japan’s capital.