J. Charles Schencking. The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan

Of all the media generalizations made about Japan following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, perhaps the most dubious was the claim that the orderly response of people in the most devastated areas reflected an inherent stoicism in the Japanese national character. We need only consider the greatest natural disaster to hit Japan in the previous century—the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923—to realize the perils of ascribing apparently timeless characteristics to particular populations. The seismic shocks on that day, which were recorded as far away as Granada, Spain, turned the Kantō region's two great cities “into a disordered mass of motion,” writes J. Charles Schencking in The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (p. 19). Conflagrations triggered by the violent shaking led panicked residents of Tokyo and Yokohama to flee, and as they did so, rumors spread that members of Japan's largest ethnic minority community were in fact starting the fires. Armed vigilante groups subsequently murdered approximately 6,000 Koreans, a frenzy of killing described by one commentator as having exposed “a moral flaw that was common among ordinary Japanese people” (p. 28). In other words, orderly behavior in 2011 was not innate but learned—and learned partly as a consequence of the 1923 disaster, when, Schencking writes, “people were poorly trained to deal with a catastrophe” (p. 72).

Character (mathematics) · Geography · Meteorology · Natural disaster · Political science · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies