UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation is a longue durée history of the 1923 Great Kantō Disaster, which explores the disaster regime formed prior to 1923 and the way the catastrophe was constructed in public memory in the decades after. As my dissertation shows, the memory of the Kantō earthquake and disaster became a powerful emotive tool used by government officials, elites, and grassroots organizations to shape the Japanese public through targeted messaging and drills during annual anniversary events. I call the Kantō disaster a “moving signifier” because of its versatile use as a source of lesson-making for socially engaged elites who produced literature, policies, speeches, and events designed to celebrate certain values and reprimand elements of Japanese society they deemed deviant or uncivilized. Delivered in national school curriculum, news articles, and official speeches and edicts, parables about the Kantō Disaster became convenient referents that elites employed to justify their own political or moral agendas between 1923 and 1945. The Japanese government’s emphasis on social lessons that could be gleaned from the catastrophe contrasts with the lived reality of Tokyo’s reconstruction after the disaster, which left the city’s urban landscape nearly as vulnerable to fire as it had been in 1923.This dissertation makes two distinct contributions to the history of disaster and Japanese history. First, it contributes to a growing field in disaster studies, building on global efforts to understand, interact with, and mitigate natural and human-made catastrophes. Additionally, this dissertation builds on pre-existing literature that explores how people's experiences with and memories of crises and catastrophes shape society over time through moments of memory-making. Too often in general histories of Japan, the Kantō disaster is treated as a disruption to the trajectory of Japanese history. This dissertation shows that the social, political, and environmental threads that came together in 1923 to make Tokyo so susceptible to a disastrous earthquake shaped Japanese society before and after the quake itself. By following these threads from the city’s beginning in the 1600s to 1945 when the city was destroyed yet again by U.S. firebombing, this dissertation reveals the extent to which earthquake and fire hazards have always been a quintessential element of daily life in Tokyo and much of the Japanese archipelago. The construction of public memory about the disaster similarly worked itself into orator’s attempts to define the Japanese empire and nation as an entity and people capable of weathering unfathomable destruction, an ethos that was repeatedly recycled by officials to prepare the public for war in the 1930s and ‘40s.