Contemporary Asia in the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. xxii, 374 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16218-0.
Do putatively natural catastrophes, like the 2011 tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan or the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, possess the power to spur a fundamental transformation of the societies that experience them? Or do disasters simply reveal—without necessarily altering—the underlying structures of these affected communities? These are overarching questions raised by Charles Schencking’s new book about the 1923 earthquake and the discourses it activated. The Great Kantō Earthquake, which claimed six times as many lives as 3.11 and struck the very heart of a nation, was at the time accorded the status of a civilization up-ending, epoch-making event. Attempting to engage with the fractured terrain of interwar Japan without grappling with this singular seismic calamity might be likened to discussing Europe in the same period but not mentioning the Great War. Yet, it seems that the Kantō quake is only now receiving the sustained critical attention outside of Japan that it deserves, in the form of groundbreaking work, including Gennifer Weisenfeld’s recent Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) and Alex Bates’ forthcoming The Culture of the Quake: The Great Kantō Earthquake and Taishō Japan (University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Press, 2015). Remarkably, Schencking’s study represents the first comprehensive, monograph-length historical examination of the Great Kantō Earthquake and post-quake reconstruction in English. This is an important and necessary book that was well worth the wait.
A central theme of Schencking’s book is that while the earthquake and fires of September 1923 were unquestionably calamitous for the region and its inhabitants, the Great Kantō Earthquake first had to be constructed (interpreted, packaged, and communicated) as a national catastrophe and turning point through the mediated process of imbuing the event with meaning and making it serve grander national purposes. The key players in this process were those political, bureaucratic, and cultural elites whom the author dubs “disaster opportunists” (7), who saw the earthquake as a “golden opportunity” to rebuild a truly modern Tokyo and reconstruct the nation according to their preferred visions. Despite their high hopes that the earthquake could serve as an animating force to unite the country and compel the people to change suspect social behaviours, however, Schencking emphasizes that progress toward physical reconstruction and spiritual regeneration was limited by contestation and resistance among elites with competing visions and from a populace hoping to quickly return to pre-quake normalcy.
Yet, before prescriptions for the physical and moral reconstruction of the nation, there was the cataclysm itself. The author begins by synthesizing an extraordinarily vivid and compelling account of the earthquake and fires, which shifts smoothly between bird’s-eye overview of the disaster, complete with hard numbers for casualties and damages, and street-level views of “hell on earth,” reflecting the lived, human experience of those days. Although focused primarily on elite perspectives on the earthquake and aftermath, in documenting how the event was experienced and constructed Schencking assembles a veritable orchestra of disparate voices including government officials, religious leaders, novelists and pop song writers, progressive social reformers, and the ordinary residents affected by the disaster and land readjustment. Horror and mourning quickly gave way to opportunism-tinged optimism for the future that would be built atop the rubble, but what is truly striking is how many of Schencking’s earthquake commentators found common ground in identifying a pernicious rot at the heart of Japanese modernity. Reflections on the disaster can read like a catalogue of largely negative national self-images: the Japanese people are varyingly characterized by commentators as undisciplined, easily panicked (a “national defect” exposed by the murderous, rumour-driven Korean panic of early September), weak, corrupt, materialistic, and hedonistic. It may be surprising that the earthquake inspired so few of the kind of comforting affirmations of national strength and resilience seen after 3.11, but the author suggests that “the seismic waves of destruction amplified the sense of anxiety, foreboding, and dislocation” (11) that long predated the quake. Anxieties about the national condition come through most powerfully in the chapter “Admonishment,” which examines the emerging consensus among both religious and non-religious observers that the disaster was “divine punishment” sent as a moral wake-up call for the people to change their decadent ways. Schencking teases out the divide between ideologues who selectively argued that the root sin of 1920s Japan was greed and materialism—and looked approvingly to the destruction of the high-class Ginza neighbourhood as proof—and those who insisted that the problem was the hedonism and frivolity embodied by the decimated Asakusa entertainment district. What might be missing from this discussion are the perspectives of interlocutors who, like satirist Miyatake Gaikotsu, contested the heavenly punishment rhetoric entirely as insulting to the tragedy’s actual victims, or even voices willing to speak in defense of “hedonism.”
One of this book’s key points of interest is the fraught saga of Tokyo’s reconstruction, from 1923 to 1930. Schencking demonstrates how former colonial official Gotō Shinpei’s grandiose and expensive plans to remake the capital along authoritarian high modernist lines were pared down to practical size through the fractious process of determining the national budget. It is significant that the first serious challenges to the very premise that the earthquake represented a “national” (rather than merely regional) disaster emerged amidst competition for finite resources that would demand actual sacrifice. Other cabinet ministers and Imperial Diet representatives were quick to remind the earthquake opportunists that there was more to the nation than its capital—and sectors such as rural Japan and the military also required resources and attention. Earthquake visionaries may, as the author suggests, have been “blinded by desolation” (184–86) to see a blank slate upon which they could project their dreams, where in fact there remained deeply rooted, very local constellations of interests and behaviours resisting radical change. In the end, the transformations attributable to the disaster were modest. Overall, this meticulously researched monograph not only provides a rare picture of how Taishō Japan worked and saw itself, but also casts a sobering light on contemporary expectations that 3.11 will necessarily transform Japan into a stronger, greener, and denuclearized country.
Andre Haag
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA