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Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Gennifer Weisenfeld
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Abstract

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Disaster is an ever-present, and ever-timely, issue both in Japan and around the world. The triple disaster of 3.11 and its extensive media coverage are a vivid reminder not only of disaster's critical and catalytic role in history, but the dynamic agency of images in mediating our experiences of natural or man-made events to produce that history. The 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures, was one of the world's worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan's worst national disaster. Having marked the 100th anniversary of the quake on September 1st, we have an opportunity to learn anew from the media scale of this catastrophe, how different media produce modes of seeing, understanding, and, eventually, remembering. Only by analyzing contending visual responses within disaster communities and how they are codified into collective memory to form a national narrative can we ultimately understand how major events like the Great Kantō Earthquake-or 3.11-become history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 8 , September 2023 , e10
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2023

References

Notes

i W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

ii I use the term visuality here to indicate “the social construction of the visual field, and the visual construction of the social field,” reciprocal processes that structure the subjectivity and agency of the viewing public. W.J.T. Mitchell, “Responses to Mieke Bal's ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’ (2003): The Obscure Object of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 2 (2003): 252. For an expanded discussion of visuality and visual studies, see Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (August 2002): 165-81.

iii Collective memory tends to reflect master narratives of an event forged by leading social and political groups to become “dominant memory.” Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7.

iv Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity (London: Thames & Hudson; Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 2003), 63.

v Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 22–23.

vi The earliest information about the disaster was sent by wireless from survivors on ships moored at Yokohama. This information was relayed throughout the country and abroad through the heroic efforts of local telecommunications operators in regional stations throughout Japan, particularly the operator at the Iwaki wireless station in Fukushima. The Kantō earthquake dramatically demonstrated the importance of wireless for national security, and Japan's experience convinced many governments to fund the technology as a priority mode of telecommunications. Joshua Hammer, Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire That Helped Forge the Path to World War II (New York: Free Press, 2006), 178-88.

vii Shinbun Shiryō Raiburarii, Kantō Daishinsai (Great Kantō Earthquake), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 1992).

viii Because of the difficulties getting access to the devastated Kantō region, aerial reconnaissance was critical in relaying information about the nature and extent of damage to coordinate external relief operations. The Japanese army flew these missions out of its base in Nagoya. J. Charles Schencking, “1923 Tokyo as a Devastated War and Occupation Zone: The Catastrophe One Confronted in Post Earthquake Japan,” Japanese Studies 29, no. 1 (2009): 117n35.

ix Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), 1-3, 11.

x Illah Nourbakhsh et al., “Mapping Disaster Zones,” Nature 439, no. 7078 (2006).

xi “Daishinsai zenki” (Full Record of the Great Earthquake), special issue, Asahi Graph, October 1923; Nihon Shinbun Hakubutsukan, ed., Daishinsai to hōdō-ten: Kantō daishinsai 80-shūnen kikaku (Exhibition of the Great Earthquake and the News: Plans for the 80th Anniversary of the Great Kantō Earthquake)(Yokohama-shi: Nihon Shinbun Hakubutsukan, 2003), 29.

xii Ōsaka Asahi Shinbunsha, Daishinsai shashin gahō (Photographic Pictorial of the Great Earthquake) (Osaka: Ōsaka Asahi Shinbunsha, 15 September 1923), 1:3.

xiii Shirai Shigeru (cameraman), Reconstruction of the Imperial Capital Seen from an Airplane (Kokusen nite fukkō no teito e) (Tokyo: Ministry of Education, 1926). Kamera to jinsei: Shirai Shigeru kaikoroku (Camera and Life: The Memoirs of Shirai Shigeru), (Tokyo: Yuni Tsūshinsha, 1983), 51-58.

xiv Edo-period earthquake maps were predominantly topographical maps that communicated the location of fires or schematic maps of the layout of the city around the shogunal castle that had arrows indicating the direction of fires, which were called “direction marker maps” (hōkaku-zuke). Tōkyō-to Edo Tokyo Hakubutsukan Toshi Rekishi Kenkyūshitsu, Kantō Daishinsai to Ansei Edo Jishin (The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Ansei Edo Earthquake), Tōkyō-to Edo Tokyo Hakubutsukan Chōsa Hōkokusho, vol. 10 (Tokyo: Tōkyō-to Edo Tōkyō Hakubutsukan: Tōkyō-to Rekishi Bunka Zaidan, 2000), 41, 190; Kinoshita Naoyuki et al., Nyūsu no tanjō: Kawaraban to shinbun nishikie no jōhō sekai/The Birth of the News, Visual Media in 19th-Century Japan, Tōkyō Daigaku korekushon (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Sōgō Kenkyū Hakubutsukan, 1999), 162-63, 78-79; Miyata Noboru and Takada Mamoru, Namazu-e: Shinsai to Nihon bunka (Catfish Pictures: Earthquakes and Japanese Culture) (Tokyo: Ribun Shuppan, 1995), 78-79.

xv Kinoshita et al., Nyūsu no tanjō, 175-77.