Session 206: Unsteady Ground: The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Cultural Aftermath of Catastrophe

Organizer and Chair: Hoyt Joshua Long, University of Michigan

Discussant: Gennifer S. Weisenfeld, Duke University

Keywords: Kanto earthquake, Japan, history, twentieth century.

When a devastating earthquake struck Japan’s greater Kanto plain on the morning of September 1, 1923, it leveled the foundations of the nation’s capital and paralyzed every aspect of the complex infrastructure that had come to be centered there. Tokyo—which was for many the indicator of Japan’s progress on the world stage of development—was laid low in an instant, sending the rest of the empire into shock.

If we assume that socio-cultural formations are intimately bound up with the physical spaces in which they reside, and that this bond grows more intense with modern capitalist development, then it behooves us to explore how such formations are fractured or rebuilt after catastrophic events destabilize the ground upon which they once rested. What happens to patterns of life and thought when they lose the very spaces into which their practice had once been embedded? How does the new ground opened up by such disaster create room to rethink, or even re-entrench, previous cultural practices and ideologies?

Our panel seeks to explore the cultural fractures and continuities that arise out of traumatic events by focusing on the Great Kanto Earthquake and the diverse array of cultural responses it engendered. We will be approaching the subject from four different perspectives: literary and visual representation, architectural design, popular and scientific discourse, and the circuits of literary production. Through a multi-disciplinary look at this single catastrophic event, we hope to explore the contradictions produced by its specific location in the national capital, its overall significance in Japan’s prewar history, and its aftereffects on the contemporary cultural landscape.

The Suffering Masses: Sympathy and Representation in the Post-Quake Literary World

Peter Alexander Bates, University of Michigan

The Great Kanto Earthquake devastated the city of Tokyo, affecting over one-million people through loss of home or family. Most of these sufferers were from the lower classes, workers living in the downtown areas of the city such as Asakusa and Honjo. In contrast, almost all professional writers, mostly living in the suburbs, escaped unharmed. They were not, however, unaffected. With this catastrophe, the insular naturalist writers of the Tokyo literary elite (the bundan) were suddenly confronted with the raw traumatic reality of the outside world. Change was brewing within the industry and the reign of the naturalists was faltering as modernist, proletarian and popular literature blossomed out of the burnt remains of the city.

My paper is a discussion of the division between the bundan and those authors writing for a larger mass audience by looking at the way suffering and sympathy play out in representations of the Kanto earthquake. Though my primary focus is on literature, specifically popular writer Nagata Mikihiko’s Daichi wa furû (The Earth Shakes, 1923), I will also draw upon the contemporary portrayal of suffering in photography and film. Whereas the writings of the bundan were concerned with detached intellectual observation, more popular representations focused on the emotional experiences of the sufferers. With this contrast as a backdrop, I will examine the way the perceived needs of the masses, given shape through popular print and film, crept into contemporary literary debates and how those debates were involved in the shifting literary landscape.

Finding Fault: Decadence, Science, and the Great Kanto Earthquake

Kerry D. Smith, Brown University

This paper explores the construction of popular narratives, in the aftermath of September 1, identifying the causes of the Great Kanto Earthquake and the destruction of Yokohama, Tokyo, and nearby communities. These narratives took many forms, but this paper will focus on two of the most prominent. In one, well-known businessmen, politicians and conservative commentators joined earthquake victims in linking Tokyo’s modernity and the actions of some of its citizens to the quake, pointing to the city’s embrace of the new and the decadent as responsible for the disaster. In another, parallel narrative, a handful of seismologists and other scientists mapped the earthquake’s mechanisms to the devastated landscape all around them, even as they situated the event in a broad, even global, historical and geological context. Both sets of narratives, one focused on decadence and the other on science/seismology, brought with them often contradictory admonitions about how citizens ought to change their behavior, and how urban life might be transformed, in order to mitigate against future catastrophes. The tensions between these responses to Japan’s and perhaps the world’s first truly modern natural disaster illuminate common beliefs about fundamental flaws in the structures of everyday life, and widely shared ideas about the nation’s possible futures.

Site-Specific? Location in Women’s Magazine Model Homes, 1920–1930

Sarah Teasley, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

When the Great Kanto Earthquake created an immense, urgent need for new housing in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, Tokyo-based commercial women’s magazines were quick on the ground to respond, first with solutions for immediate concerns like heating for temporary housing, then with more lasting suggestions for rebuilding a fire- and earthquake-resistant urban fabric. From January 1924, however, magazines shifted tack, and began presenting descriptions of model houses that referred to the disaster tacitly, if at all. Often created by well-known architects, the majority of designs followed the "Culture House" model promoted by reformers as ideal for urban middle-class nuclear families since the 1910s, and showed little difference from model home articles published before the quake.

In other words, since the major women’s magazines boasted national readerships, one localized natural disaster allowed reformers to promote housing modernization throughout the Empire. At the same time, however, magazines inevitably stressed the metropolitan location of the houses represented, thus identifying one stage for modern life—the single-family-owned home—with another—the metropolis.

Speculating that this fracture between the media space of the Empire and the material space of some of its residents defined not only the magazines’ reception but also their content, this paper takes post-earthquake articles on housing in best-selling women’s magazines as a barometer for tracing changes and continuities in the psychic geography of prewar Japan and the role of the home as a mediated symbol of nationhood within that imagined space.

In the Absence of a Center: Provincializing Literary Production after the Kanto Earthquake

Hoyt Joshua Long, University of Michigan

Within just a few short weeks of the Great Kanto Earthquake, provincial bookstore owners throughout Japan were predicting a rough road ahead. Inventories were being depleted rapidly and many were uncertain when the flow of magazines and books from Tokyo, upon which they were utterly dependent, would resume. Behind their dilemma lay a quarter century of centralization in which most of Japan’s literary infrastructure—including production, marketing, and distribution—had come to ground itself in the capital. With the earthquake, much of that infrastructure came crashing down.

Responses from the literary community, which had grown equally dependent on Tokyo, varied widely as writers attempted to confront the significance of their art in the aftermath of such a traumatic event. One group of writers stands out, however, for the way in which their responses foregrounded the very connection between literary form and the actual spaces of literary production. This group, whose essays appeared in both Tokyo and regional media, argued for a fundamental turn away from the center in hopes of ultimately provincializing the literary establishment and thus restoring balance to what they saw as a wholly uneven state of affairs.

This paper will explore some of the discourse produced by these writers in the years after the quake, analyzing how that discourse situated itself in relation to the event and how it represented a marked change from pre-quake literary appropriations of the provinces. In the process, the paper will connect to larger concerns with the material circuits of literary, production, spatial representation, and the potential for catastrophe to fracture ideology along spatial lines.