LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter1

      THE END AND THE BEGINNING

      There was foreboding in Japan on September 1, 1923. September 2 would be the Two-Hundred-Tenth Day, counting from the day in early February when spring is held to begin. Awaited each year with apprehension, it comes during the typhoon season and the harvest. The conjunction of the two, harvest and typhoon, can mean disaster. The disaster of that year came instead on September 1.

      The morning was warm, heavy, as most days of late summer are, with the shrilling of locusts. The mugginess was somewhat relieved by brisk winds, which shifted from east to south at about nine. A low-pressure zone covered the southern part of the Kantō Plain, on the fringes of which the city lies. The winds became stronger as the morning drew on. Rain fell, stopping at eleven. The skies cleared.

      The city was awaiting the don, the “bang” of the cannon which since 1871 had been fired at noon every day in the palace plaza.

      At one minute and fifteen and four-tenths seconds before noon, the great earthquake struck. The initial shocks were so violent that the seismographs at the Central Weather Bureau went out of commission. The surviving seismograph at Tokyo Imperial University made the only detailed record of the long series of quakes, more than seventeen hundred over the next three days. The epicenter was in Sagami Bay, southeast of the city. There was sinkage along a deep trough and a rising along the sides. The eastern limits of the modern city follow one earthquake zone, which runs along the Edo River and out into Tokyo Bay, and lie very near another, which crosses the wide mouth of Sagami Bay from the tip of the Chiba Peninsula to the tip of the Izu Peninsula. There had been a disastrous quake in 1855, centered on the Edo River zone, and a major though less disastrous one in the summer of 1894, also centered on the nearer of the two zones. It was assumed at that time that there would presently be another, and it is so assumed today, in 1982. Talk in 1923 of moving the capital to safer regions had been quieted by a proclamation from the emperor himself.

      Between noon of September 1 and the evening of September 2, most of the Tokyo flatlands—the eastern sections of the city, the Shitamachi or “Low City”—went up in flames. The Low City produced most of what was original in the culture of Edo (as Tokyo had been known until the Meiji emperor moved there from Kyoto in 1867). Much of the Low City survived on the morning of September 1, and then, in forty hours or so, most of it disappeared.

      Though we do not know how many died in the earthquake and the fires that followed, initial reports in the Western press almost certainly exaggerated. The Los Angeles Times informed a large and alarmed Japanese readership that half a million had died. The highest estimates today put the figure for Tokyo at something over a hundred thousand. Far more were killed in the fires than in the earthquake itself, and there seem to have been more deaths from drowning than from collapsed buildings.

      Almost half the deaths, or perhaps more than half, if lower estimates are accepted for the total, occurred in an instant at a single place in the Low City, a park, formerly an army clothing depot, near the east or left bank of the Sumida River. Fires had started in several parts of the city soon after the initial shocks. There were whirlwinds of fire up and down the Sumida from midafternoon; the largest of them, according to witnesses, covered about the area of the Sumō wrestling gymnasium, the largest building east of the river, and was several hundred feet high. A flaming whirlwind came down upon the park at about four in the afternoon, and incinerated upwards of thirty thousand people who had fled there from the fires sweeping the Low City.

      Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, the great writer of short stories and a man of strong suicidal impulses, liked to tell people that had he then been in his native Honjo, east of the river, he would probably have taken refuge where everyone else did, and been spared the trouble of suicide.

      “In a family of nine, relatives of my wife, only a son, about twenty, survived. He was standing with a shutter over his head to ward off sparks when he was picked up by a whirlwind and deposited in the Yasuda garden. There he regained consciousness.”

      The traditional wooden house has great powers of resistance to wind, flood, and earthquake. It resisted well this time too, and then came the fires, leaving only scattered pockets of buildings across the Low City. The damage would have been heavy if the quakes alone had caused it, but most of the old city would have survived. Even then, seventy years after the arrival of Commodore Perry and fifty-five years after the resignation of the last Edo shogun, it was built mostly of wood. Buildings of more substantial materials came through the quakes well, though many were gutted by the fires. There has been much praise for the aplomb with which Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel came through, built as it was of volcanic stone on an “earthquake-proof” foundation. It did survive, and deserves the praise; yet so did a great many other modern buildings (though not all). The Mitsukoshi Department Store suffered only broken windows from the quake, but burned as brightly as the sun, people who saw it said, when the fires took over. That the Imperial Hotel did not burn brightly was due entirely to chance.

      It is difficult to judge earthquake damage when fires sweep a city shortly afterwards. Memories shaken and distorted by the horror of it all must be counted on to establish what was there in the brief interval between quake and fire. The best information suggests that after it was over almost three-quarters of the buildings in the city had been destroyed or seriously damaged, and almost two-thirds of them were destroyed or gutted by fire. The earthquake itself can be held clearly responsible only for the difference between the two figures.

      Fifteen wards made up the city; a single one remained untouched by fire. It lay in the High City, the hilly regions to the west. In five wards the loss was above 90

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