By Lawrence I. Charters
Seahawk, August 24, 1984, pp. 6-7.
As August closed in 1923, Japan was in a state of transition. Prime Minister Kato Tomosaburo had died on Aug. 25, and so far no new cabinet had been formed to take over the government. The nation’s economy was growing rapidly but also unsteadily, in large part because Japan’s European and American trading partners were still recovering from World War I. The yen rate, though, was firmly set at two to the dollar.
On September 1, two minutes before noon, a violent earthquake struck the Kanto Plain. Centered in the Pacific Ocean a few miles south of Yokosuka, the quake hit particularly hard in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, Ibaraki, Saitama, Yamanashi, and Shizuoka prefectures. Twenty-four hours later another tremor, almost as bad as the first, again rocked the area, and several hundred smaller aftershocks kept residents uneasy for nearly a week. Yet the quake damage, great as it was, soon faded from memory
in the face of a greater menace: fire.
Charcoal and wood stoves, started in preparation for the noon meal on September 1, were battered around by the violent shocks, causing tens of thousands of small fires. In the cities, shattered gas mains fed the flames and explosions leveled whole blocks. Superheated air, aided by autumn breezes, rose into the atmosphere, leaving a vacuum behind. As fresh air rushed in at ground level strong winds were formed, eventually growing
to typhoon strength. Tornadoes, almost unheard of in Japan, rampaged across Tokyo, formed of fire as well as wind.
One tornado passed over the Military Clothing Depot in Honjo, on the outskirts of Tokyo, where huge numbers of refugees from the quake and fire had gathered. Intensely hot, the tornado sucked up all available oxygen in the area; in its wake 40,000 people suffocated.
Initially, it was difficult to even guess at the extent of the damage. Water and fire mains had been destroyed, telephone and telegraph service wiped out, and even radio communications suffered unusual problems. Military planes were pressed into service for courier duty, and carrier pigeons handled vital messages. Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, a retired admiral, was appointed Prime Minister on September 2, and one of his cabinet’s first acts was to declare martial law.
When the quakes and fires had finished, almost a week later, 104,619 people were reported dead or missing, with over 52,000 more injured. In Tokyo, with a population of 2,265,000, over 1.6 million people were left homeless. Yokohama, closer to the epicenter, suffered damage to 95 percent of all buildings, leaving more than 85 percent of the population homeless. By comparison, the April 18, 1906, San Francisco earthquake and fire killed 618 and left a quarter million people without homes.
Yokosuka, the city closest to the epicenter, suffered enormous damage. Several vessels were stranded when the floor of the harbor, raised several feet by the quake, left them high and dry. The battleship Mikasa, pride of Japan’s fleet in the Russo-Japanese war, was left aground in what is now Green Bay, and two months later was stricken from the active list. Government plans had called for moving the ship to Tokyo sometime in the future as a memorial; in the wake of the disaster these plans were scrapped.
Over 100 of the naval base’s 14,000 workers were killed in the quake, and several ships in drydock were overturned. The giant 40,000 ton Amagi, undergoing conversion from a battleship to an aircraft carrier, suffered such severe damage it had to be broken up. Most of the naval hospital, located on a hill in what is now the city’s Chuo Koen [Central Park], was obliterated. Building C-1, present home of CNF J, suffered severe damage when its brick chimneys flew apart and crashed through the roof. Azuma island, then as now a fuel terminal, caught fire and vanished for several days under the smoke and flame of 24 million gallons of burning fuel.
In the city of Yokosuka, 683 lost their lives in the disaster, 7,227 houses were knocked down by the quake, and another 4,700 burned down in the fire that followed. Huge tent camps sprouted up along the waterfront. With the city’s water system destroyed, all washing and cooking had to be done with salt water drawn from Tokyo Bay.
Yokosuka, along with the rest of Japan, managed to move on past the initial grief, and bigger, stronger, more modern cities replaced the blackened ruins. Even so, sixty-one years later the memory of Kanto Daishinsai – the Kanto Great Disaster – burns brightly.
[Note: this was my first attempt at creating a headline on a computer. The headline was created on a Macintosh, printed on two sheets of white paper, and then photo-etched on to the Velox plate (photographic plate) used to print the paper. There was, at the time, no way to know how it would look until the plate was completed.]
