Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2020. xviii, 330 pp. (Map, B&W photos, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$32.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-674-24783-3.
Earthquake Children is a welcome addition to scholarship on disasters in Japan and specifically the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. In this book, Janet Borland mines new sources to argue for the central role played by children, along with the people and infrastructure that surrounded them, in the rebuilding of Tokyo after the quake and in Japan’s noted disaster resilience. In so doing, Borland critiques the idea that effective disaster response is an inborn Japanese trait due to a long history of earthquakes and fires and suggests instead that this resilience was deliberately constructed only 100 years ago through child-centred processes: “Japan’s contemporary culture of disaster preparedness and its people’s ability to respond calmly in a time of emergency are the result of learned and practiced behaviours that began in earnest with children following the Great Kantō Earthquake” (9).
Borland has published on the Kantō earthquake and children, schools, education, and the urban environment previously, but this book extends that work to explore a larger question: “How and why children became a focus of efforts made by teachers, education officials, seismologists, and architects to build resilience in Japanese society” (2). Centreing the narrative on children shows how they are more vulnerable to the harmful effects of disasters and also how they can also be the sites through which social resilience is fostered. As Borland writes, “[c]hildren, schools, and education became the primary tools through which officials sought to build a disaster prepared society and a disaster-resilient nation” (7). While “primary” may be an overstatement, Borland makes a strong argument for their importance.
The book begins with an informative explanation of the concept of vulnerability and the different ways in which Tokyo inhabitants, especially children, were in a vulnerable position when the earthquake struck. Borland helpfully identifies vulnerabilities in the local geology, built environment, and disaster training/education. These weaknesses came into sharp focus with the 1923 disaster, described in chapter 2 through the narratives of children. For this, Borland draws heavily on personal accounts and drawings by children collected in the Tōkyō shiritsu shōgakkō jidō: Shinsai kinen bunshū (Collection of essays commemorating the earthquake by Tokyo’s primary school children), an unusual and rich look into children in disaster in their own words and images. Several children’s drawings from the book are reproduced in vivid colour, which adds to the intensity of the experiences related from first-hand reports.
Chapters 3 and 4 explore children’s experiences of relief and reconstruction. Chapter 3 shows the ways images and narratives of suffering children were used to “mobilize humanitarian feeling throughout Japan” (101). Chapter 4 includes a fascinating view of early efforts to understand the effects of traumatic events like the earthquake on children’s mental health, addressing what we now recognize as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Borland notes that contemporary scholars of PTSD in children seldom “consider the historical context within which children first became recognized as victims with unique material and psychological needs” (107). This book lays a crucial foundation from which future historical studies of childhood trauma can build.
Chapters 5 and 6 show the ways teachers, principals, and thinkers worked to return to classrooms and instill the morals needed for resilience and recovery. Chapter 6 is central to the book and a particularly important addition to the field because it showcases the “genesis of modern Japan’s unparalleled disaster preparedness regime” (179). One of the important things Borland shows is that it took over ten years of work by seismologist Imamura Akitsune and others to get disaster preparedness into the school curriculum, showing the inertia that could have resulted in continued inaction.
Although it is noted in the study, I wish the author had more fully explored the panic surrounding rumours of Korean violence and the subsequent massacre. In chapter 4, Borland quotes a principal’s observation that children might express their trauma in unhealthy ways such as playing “vigilante-style games” (117). Another term for this, “Korean play” (Chōsenjin gokko), also appeared widely in discourse at the time. The phenomenon of children play-acting this atrocity would benefit from extended scholarly attention. Why was combatting rumours and violence not as high a priority as instilling calm in the face of fires and earthquakes? How might educators and leaders have worked to combat susceptibility to xenophobic rumours? By what mechanisms might xenophobia be transmitted to future generations alongside new knowledge of disaster preparedness?
Borland concludes with a chapter on building disaster-resistant schools, which were indeed important signs of modernity in reconstructed Tokyo. Although constrained by budgets and other political forces, schools represented some of the greatest successes in the rebuilding of the capital. This brings the book full circle; the first chapter outlines the deficiencies in mental preparedness and in the built environment that made Tokyo more vulnerable and chapters 6 and 7 show how those deficiencies were improved in the reconstruction, an effort that continues today.
In the epilogue, Borland describes how reforms in Tokyo spread to other regions of Japan as they responded to subsequent disasters, resulting in national guidelines for school buildings in the 1930s and recommendations for disaster preparedness drills. She then brings the story to the 2011 disasters stemming from the Tōhoku earthquake to show the results of these efforts, which unquestionably saved lives but also revealed new vulnerabilities from which lessons can be gleaned.
This fascinating and well-researched volume makes a clear case for the important roles played by children and those thinking about children in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake. Children were symbols of vulnerability, resilience, and hope, and they were also vessels through which the lessons learned in the quake could be mobilized for future disasters. This book will be a worthwhile addition to libraries and useful for scholars of disasters and childhood.
Alex Bates
Dickinson College, Carlisle