PICTURING AND MEMORIALIZING DISASTER IN JAPAN:
VISUAL RESPONSES TO THE GREAT KANTÖ EARTHQUAKE OF 1923

When a massive earthquake on the order of 7.9 hit the Kantō region on September 1, 1923, it caused close to 100,000 people to be crushed or incinerated, which was quickly reported in the press around the world. Soon dubbed “the Great Kantō Earthquake” (Kantō Daishinsai), it wreaked unprecedented damage and razed nearly forty-four percent of the Tokyo metropolitan land area—the capital of the Japanese empire. No one in the Kantō region was left untouched by the 1923 calamity. A vivid outpouring of grief, sympathy, nostalgia, anger, and samaritanism flowed from the artistic community resulting in a body of work that testifies to the potency of this traumatic event in the collective Japanese imagination.

This paper will present a range of visual interventions that attempted to represent, re-enact, rememorate, and commemorate the earthquake experience in the time period spanning from immediately after the horrifying event to ten years later when the city officially celebrated the “completion” of its reconstruction effort. The earthquake triggered cultural responses that ran the gamut from shocked and solemn commemoration to emacipatory euphoria, commodified media spectacle to sacred space, voyeuristic and macabre thrill to the aestheticized sublime, and expressions of national solidarity to sociopolitical critique and racist vigilantism. In comparing and contrasting these varied responses to catastrophe in a temporal context, I hope to show the multiplicity and unstable nature of this traumatic experience, and the heterogeneous responses to calamity.