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Lessons from the Great Kantō Earthquake
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
This article shows how security forces in Japan in the early 1960s used studies of the violence and unrest that followed the Great Kantō Earthquake as templates for speculation about the challenges they would face in the aftermath of Tokyo's next disastrous earthquake. Both studies reiterated the ambiguities associated with earlier state-sanctioned descriptions of the circumstances surrounding the massacres of Koreans and others in 1923, while maintaining that the Imperial Japanese Army and the police had done all they could to prevent that violence. The Self-Defense Agency and police analysts responsible for the two new studies concluded that if the capital district were to suffer another earthquake disaster like the one in 1923, then it was quite likely that the spread of misinformation – among other factors – would once again lead to outbreaks of vigilante violence and political instability, leaving the police and the SDF with no choice but to respond as their counterparts had forty years earlier.
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- Copyright © The Authors 2023