This essay explores two different approaches to disaster found in fiction following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923: trauma and differential vulnerability.

Disaster risk reduction experts and organizations across Tokyo are using the 100th anniversary of the Great Kantō Earthquake as an opportunity to not only remember the disaster, but also to urge residents to rethink their disaster preparedness in anticipation of the next big earthquake. At Yokoamichō Park, the Tokyo Metropolitan Memorial Association worked with local primary schools in Sumida ward to bring to life precious records written by children who experienced the 1923 earthquake and fires. From September 2023, a multi-media compilation of children's accounts will be featured in a new exhibition at the Great Kantō Earthquake Memorial Museum.

There was an ongoing public debate on earthquake forecasting in the early 20th century between two Japanese seismologists, Akitsune IMAMURA and Fusakichi OMORI. In 1905 Imamura pointed out in a magazine article that historically Tokyo had been hit by large earthquakes every 100 years on average. Imamura argued that as the last one was 50 years ago, assuming quasi-periodicity, another one could be expected in the next several tens of years. Imamura's thesis was reported sensationally in several newspaper articles in early 1906. Omori responded by making strong criticisms of Imamura's work in a magazine article. The debate flared up in 1912, and simmered in following years. On Sept. 1, 1923 the Great Kantō earthquake occurred, killing approximately 105,000 persons. Some people regarded the occurrence of the 1923 earthquake as proof that Imamura made a successful prediction and that Omori's criticisms were wrong. This episode has lessons for us even today.

The murderous mayhem following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which resulted in infamous Korean massacres, was most commonly known and commemorated in Japanese at the time using the term Chōsenjin sawagi, which ambiguously evoked a disturbance involving Korean people. Although both Chōsenjin sawagi and “panic” represent contested lenses for viewing the atrocity, this essay revisits the event and its narration through an approach informed by the local multi-semantic sign sawagi and the transnational framework of colonial panic. By highlighting overlooked connections and continuities that run through the vocabularies and stories of a culture of colonial fear and insecurity, it is possible to apprehend the Chōsenjin sawagi as a colonial panic attack that hit the imperial center, but also a revolt against the logic of integrated empire that echoed the 1919 March First Independence Uprising in Korea, another event discursively contained within the framework of sawagi.

The decade following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 witnessed a proliferation of writings by officials, academics, businessmen, and journalists on the economic consequences of the disaster. This abundance of contemporary analysis stands in strong contrast to the relative scarcity of subsequent scholarly studies of many aspects of the disaster's economic impact. In this article, I suggest that part of the reason for this relative lacuna lies in broader trends within economics and economic history scholarship. In particular, a focus on quantitative analysis and macro-level indicators has led to the conclusion that over the longer term, the Kantō earthquake, like similar disasters elsewhere, did not matter that much for the development of the country's economy. I also show that although recent advances in economic theory, especially in the economics of disasters, can strengthen historians' analyses of the economic consequences of the 1923 disaster, many of these ‘new’ conceptual frameworks were foreshadowed by contemporary commentators seeking to analyze the impact of the disaster on the economic life of the nation. Ikeuchi Yukichika's book Shinsai Keizai Shigan, published in December 1923, is a particularly good example of how, just like recent disaster economists, Japanese contemporaries viewed the analysis of markets as the key to understanding both the economic impact of the disaster and how best to rebuild Japan's economy.

Why do we give to distant sufferers in need? Are we motivated primarily by altruism or opportunism? What, if anything, do givers expect in return for significant acts of generosity? This article explores these questions through an examination of corporate giving to Japan from America's industrial heartland following the Great Kantō Earthquake. Large corporate donations comprised a significant part of America's “tsunami of aid” to Japan in 1923. Why? What did corporate givers hope to accomplish or achieve? Recognition of Japan as an important commercial partner and expectations of expanded trade, my findings suggest, significantly influenced donations from key corporate actors.

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.

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.

Watanave Hidenori and his team at the University of Tokyo use social media, satellite images and other digital resources to research and map wars and natural disasters, partly as a way of rebooting and preserving their memory. In addition to the 1923 quake, the team has produced digital archives of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings, and the 2011 Tohoku (Great East Japan) tsunami, and they currently track war damage in Ukraine, following Russia's invasion in 2022. Questions by Tristan Grunow, Laura Hein, and David McNeill. Questions were posed in English, to which Watanave responded in Japanese. Answers have been translated from Japanese, and can be found after the English interview.