As THE inflationary crisis was reaching its climax in Germany, a cataclysm of an entirely different kind occurred on the other side of the globe. Moments before noon on Saturday 1 September 1923, Japan was struck by a massive earthquake. The inhabitants were accustomed to seismic upheavals, superstition attributing them to the movements of the giant catfish Narnazu which lived under their volcanic isles. Indeed, when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited Japan he was amazed to discover that
the needle on the seismometer was never still. But this was different. It measured 8.3 on the Richter Scale, which made it significantly stronger than the force that had razed San Francisco in 1906, and its epicentre was only 3o miles south of Yokohama. According to witnesses, the first shock felt like "a grinding blow beneath our feet." It rose to a sickening "crescendo of turmoil." This lasted only about fifteen seconds but its effect was stupendous. As the captain of a ves-sel in the port of Yokohama observed, the whole city undulated "like the surface of the ocean under a great storm." With a deafening roar nearly all the buildings in Yokohama and most of those in Tokyo toppled to the ground. Acres were flattened and many thousands were killed at once. Rows of new houses vanished under landslides while medieval ruins, buried for hundreds of years, suddenly came to light. Roads were gashed with crevasses large enough to swallow an automobile; trains crashed as railway lines buckled and bridges collapsed; tram and telegraph wires fes-tooned the streets like monstrous spiders' webs. What one witness called the "insanely malicious forces of nature" appeared to have battered nearby villages into the ground with "a gigantic flail."While the earth continued to tremble and choking yellow dust filled the air, the survivors, many crazed with fear, fled into parks and open spaces. Almost at once fires began, as charcoal cooking braziers (hibachi) kin-dled the remains of wood and paper dwellings. Gas flaring from broken pipes added to the conflagration. It was fanned by a wind known as tatsumaki—the dragon's twist. This spread sparks to the futons, or padded quilts, carried by many refugees, turning them into involuntary pyro-maniacs. It also drove flames over the wide Sumida River, where thou-sands of people sheltering at a clothing depot in the working-class suburb of Honjo were incinerated. In Yokohama huge oil storage tanks on the hillside burst, releasing an avalanche of fuel which quickly ignited. Many sought refuge in canals or at sea, only to be burned alive as streams of blaz-ing oil covered the water. Boats in the harbour were set alight or sunk by tidal waves. On land incandescent tempests erupted. They were nothing like the familiar city blazes known as the "flowers of Edo," but rather a ter-rifying adumbration of the fire-storms caused by saturation bombing dur-ing the Second World War. Many suffocated, like those in the crush at Hongo Station. Others were whirled into the air, human brands plucked from the burning. Thousands died in "ghastly, grotesque attitudes,"62 their arms upraised in a hopeless attempt to ward off the furnace heat. After dark, people ten miles away could read by its light. Immersed in billows of flame which roared like heavy guns, Yokohama presented "an amazing, grand and terrifying spectacle."63 Amid the glare and stench of death, the impression of war was compounded: soldiers started to dynamite build-ings in order to make fire-breaks and to shoot the wild animals which were roaming the streets after escaping from their shattered cages in the zoo. Despite all efforts the holocaust lasted for several days. The Japanese responded variously. In the frenzied exodus from the cities some fugitives were trampled underfoot. Martial law was declared, but there were cases of hysteria, cowardice, looting and "foul work by ghouls.”64 Large stocks of rice had been destroyed and food riots occurred. More horrible was the wave of paranoia which soon engulfed the nation. Searching for scape-goats, people blamed the inferno on immigrant Korean workers—for whom they felt an atavistic racial antagonism. The authorities claimed to have uncovered a gigantic Korean plot involving arson, looting, bombing and murder. Fifteen thousand Koreans were interned and many others were tortured and massacred. Some were literally crucified. Japanese youths armed with spears and swords acted as vigilantes and "appeared to have lost their reason. "65 The police behaved no better, rounding up a number of left-wing radicals, some of whom were beaten and killed. An army officer took the opportunity to assassinate the imprisoned anarchist leader Osugi, breaking his back with a ju-jitsu hold and then strangling his common-law wife and child. He was never brought to justice. Fears of subversion were not entirely groundless. Among the crowd seeking sanctuary inside the walled and moated gardens of the Imperial Palace, one man cried ominously: "Remember Russia!"66 Later these 247-acre grounds, with their exquisite pavilions and pools, terraces and court-yards, streams, bridges and flowers, were thrown open to refugees. The Prince Regent Hirohito, who had become head of state in 1921 as a result of his father's madness, was absent from Tokyo but several members of his family were killed. Although he soon returned, there was some resentment at his failure adequately to reassure and commiserate with his subjects. Doubtless Hirohito was inhibited by protocol, which ruled out sponta-neous demonstrations of emotion. But three months after the earthquake a young socialist attempted to assassinate him because he had not raised an ideal state on the ruins. It was one of the many paradoxes of Japan that violent social indisci-pline could coexist with adamantine social order. Zen Buddhism, with its doctrine that salvation lies in following the dictates of one's heart whatever the earthly consequences, encouraged a sublime nonconformity. At the same time the Japanese were so devoted to the ideal of national polity (kokutai) that they sometimes burst the bounds of orthodoxy and became more imperial than the Emperor. Yet their commitment to fulfilling obli-
gations at any cost, not excepting hara-kiri, resulted in a community spirit almost inconceivable to individualistic foreigners, who were inclined to disparage it as an archaic hangover from feudalism or a sinister portent of the "hive mentality." However, many Westerners caught up in the earth-quake benefited from the self-denying code of their Oriental servants, who often sacrificed their own interests in order to save their employers' lives or to rescue their possessions. Most Japanese, indeed, behaved with exemplary courage and restraint, and some were heroic. So bad had the destruction been in Tokyo that it was initially feared that the capital would have to be moved to another site. But citizens took heart from Premier Yamamoto's exhortation to "unite and rebuild." Salvage work began almost immediately and some construction started before the ashes were cool. People waited stoically in food queues two miles long. There were many patriotic demonstrations. None was more moving than that prompted by a schoolmaster who, after fire had swept through a host of his companions, cried: 'All present shout three banzais with me." Two hundred voices were raised in the most pitiful cheer ever heard." Because communications were cut, the outside world was slow to grasp the scale of the Japanese tragedy: perhaps 140,000 dead, tens of thousands injured and devastation which was likened to that of Armageddon. As one witness wrote, "Imagine the Somme battle-fields and the ruins of Ypres on a gigantic but concentrated scale and you have a picture, though not even realistic enough, of Tokyo and the country around.” At two billion dol-lars, the cost of renovation amounted to 4o per cent of the country's gross national product. It not only wiped out the 400-million-dollar profit which Japan had made out of the First World War, it crippled the entire economy. In the words of an American authority, this was "the greatest financial catastrophe of the age." Foreign countries, particularly the United States, responded generously to the disaster, donating millions of dollars and enabling relief agencies like the Red Cross to deliver food, clothing, tents, medical supplies and other aid to the stricken cities. But this largesse did little more than point up the contrast between America's wealth and Japan's poverty. It was poverty so acute that the masses could seldom afford to eat much more than rice and salt—Prince Saionji hailed it as a notable improvement when they were later able to augment this diet with bean paste (mire) and soy sauce. During the various economic crises of the 192os, farmers—and agriculture employed half of Japan's 6o million people—had no recourse but to sell their daughters into prostitution. Sometimes it seemed as though this were Japan's most prosperous business
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