June 2, 2014 • 28 mins
Sept. 1, 1923 changed Japan forever when a devastating earthquake obliterated Yokohama and much of Tokyo, killing more than 140,000.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and uh,
today we will start by asking Tracy a question. Have
(00:21):
you ever been in an earthquake? Not that I perceived, well,
you know, because there are small earthquakes everywhere all the time,
and there are earthquakes that are felt in Georgia sometime.
And I remember the last time there was an earthquake
that was felt pretty strongly in Georgia. I was in Massachusetts.
Oh that's right. And so I was seeing all of
(00:43):
these tweets from my friends about the earthquake, and I
was like, I am not there. Well, and they're so
infrequent in Georgia, a lot of us didn't know what
was going on. Like I literally thought that someone had
slammed into like my neighbor's house, like a car had
collided collided with something. Um, and I pretty is to this.
When I was very small, I lived on the Pacific coast,
so I would occasionally experience one, but never like a
(01:07):
huge one. However, people in Japan deal with earthquakes all
the time. Uh, it's no secret that Japan is situated
on one of the most dangerous positions our globe has
to offer. UH. It sits on what's called the Ring
of Fire. And probably most of our listeners know about this,
but just in case they don't, that is a horseshoe
shape that runs sort of around the Pacific Ocean. It
(01:29):
goes from the southern tip of South America, travels north
along the North American Coast, it crosses the Burying Strait,
and then it travels down to New Zealand by way
of Japan. And that sort of odd horseshoe shape actually
outlines the meeting zones of various tectonic plates, and the
Eurasian Plate meets up with the Pacific Plate and the
(01:49):
Philippine Plate and the North American Plate all along where
Japan sits. So as you can imagine, with all of
those plates rubbing together, the country is no stranger to earthquake. UH.
It's actually estimated that Japan has some level of earthquake
at least every five minutes, and that they experience as
many as two thousand quakes each year that are strong
(02:10):
enough for humans to feel them. Twenty of the world's
earthquakes that are classified as magnitude six or greater actually
happened in Japan. And when you consider how much actual
landmass Japan has as compared to the rest of the world,
you really get a sense of what a level of
concentration that is. And today, the Tokyo Yokohama metropolis, which
(02:33):
sits in the Kanto region, is home to approximately thirty
five million people, and it's actually considered to have the
highest earthquake risk of any metro area in the entire world. Uh.
And today we're going to chat about an epic tragedy
that happened in Kanto more than ninety years ago. It's
fairly famous, although I think it's been long ago that
(02:55):
it kind of fades out of people's consciousness. They forget
that this happened, uh if they weren't directly involved in it,
or they don't have a cultural connection to it. So
on September one, Japan basically changed forever. A completely devastating
earthquake obliterated Yokohama and much of Tokyo, and more than
a hundred and forty thousand people were killed. I'm glad
(03:16):
you decided to do this episode because it's been on
my list of things that I wanted us to talk
about for a while. And it also plays a part
in the last Miyazaki movie called The Wind Rizoes that
came out not long ago, which was the latest thing
that made me think we should do an episode on this, uh.
And I haven't seen that movie yet ninety two and
it is it's a really important touchstone in world history, really,
(03:40):
and we'll get to sort of why towards the end
of the episode. But to start off, we will talk
a little bit about Yokohama and Tokyo and where they
were at in terms of development when this all happened.
The port city of Yokohama was once known as the
City of Silk, and it was Japan's first foreign settlement.
It was founded as such in eighteen fifty nine, and
(04:02):
this was a little more than five years after the
U S commodore Matthew Perry, who we mentioned in the
Okeechee episode. We being not me because I was not
here then. Yeah, that was when Sarah and I were together. Yes,
so uh, he landed in Japan and forced the opening
of Japan to the west. Prior to this time, Yokohama
has had existed as just a quiet fishing village, and
(04:26):
between Yokohama's establishment as a foreign settlement, uh and the
early nineteen twenties, the time that we're talking about today,
it really grew extremely quickly. It had developed into a
bustling city. It had a population of about half a
million people. But all of that development that Yokohama had
seen in you know, just six decades, was gone in
a matter of hours the day the great quake hit.
(04:50):
At this time, Tokyo was already the capital of Japan,
and it was a huge metropolitan area that was recognized
as a cultural intellectual hub, and it had also been
ex variencing a huge boon of industrialization in the time
leading up to this. Yes, factories were popping up throughout
the areas which are sometimes referred to as Low Tokyo.
(05:11):
The population density around those factories, in those neighborhoods increased significantly,
and many of the people that were living there were uh,
not surprisingly, factory workers, and many of them were living
at or below the poverty line in law, in homes
that were really kind of subpar in terms of construction.
They were. There were a lot of sort of shacks
(05:33):
and a lot of people living very closely together. So
Tokyo had adopted building methods from the Western world during
the Meiji era and that ran from eighteen sixty eight
and nineteen twelve. But even in spite of this development,
there were still a whole lot of all wooden structures
in the city and that left it extremely vulnerable to earthquakes.
(05:53):
So at eleven fifty eight am on September one, three,
the first shocks of the quake hit, and at this hour,
families were just sitting down to lunch, so people that
had been at work in the morning had gone home
in many cases for the lunchtime hour, and the quake
was reported by survivors as lasting about fourteen seconds, and
(06:15):
in that very short period of time, even though that's
a long time for a quake, most of Yokohama's buildings
were completely brought down just in that first tremor. This
quake originated south of Tokyo, near Oshima Island in the
Sagami Bay, and it was the result of the Philippine
Plate colliding with the much larger Eurasian Plate, and depending
(06:36):
on the source, its magnitude was somewhere between seven point
nine and eight point two, so that's an extremely strong earthquake. Yeah,
in UH that time, even in Tokyo, which is a
little bit north of Yokohama, and they are, as we said,
often grouped together as a metro area. More than half
of the brick buildings collapsed, and an estimated one tenth
(06:59):
of the you steel reinforce structures that still exists that
existed at the time were destroyed. So already, just in
that first UH quake range, there was a whole lot
of destruction. But before we get to the really sort
of harrowing and horrible things that happened, we're going to
do a quick ad from our sponsors so we don't
(07:20):
break up some kind of intense discussion. So to get
to what happened next, Historians agree that while the devastation
of the immense tremors of the earthquake was great, the
true destructive course that day was fire. The timing of
the quake, as I said earlier, striking just as lunch
(07:41):
was about to be served, was basically perfect in its
terrible nous. Uh Overturned stoves which had been finishing up
food prep caused fires throughout the area, and high winds
fueled the fires and helped them to spread and spread
extremely rapidly, so all of those open names that were
being used to prepare you know, the last stages of
(08:03):
lunch basically just caused uh these huge fires, which led
to incredible devastation. The buildings that had survived the tremor
were largely brought down. UH. It was extremely rough. It's
estimated that there were more than a hundred and thirty
major fires just breaking out in Tokyo in the half
(08:26):
hour following the first tremor. So whereas the initial quake
took out most of Yokohama, fires burned Tokyo City center
to the ground. And one of the most sort of
horrifying and heartbreaking aspects of this fire uh. And this,
you know, aftershocks of the earthquake, was the development of
(08:48):
this phenomenon that are called dragon twists, and these are
basically fire tornadoes. There twisters that are nothing but fire.
And for example, one twister of fire swept over a
make shift camp where people had run to seek refuge
after the initial destruction, and they were trapped there and
burned to death by this tornado that went over them.
(09:11):
Five different whirling firestorms swept across the collapsed neighborhoods of Tokyo,
and many eyewitness accounts of this horrible day used the
imagery of hell on earth and their descriptions of the
destruction in the horror. Yeah, if you read any eyewitness
accounts or even people that have you know, sort of
had an oral history handed down through their families, they
(09:34):
will almost all say that the people that talked about
it called it hell. I mean, it really was just
nothing but fire and devastation. And as fires and aftershocks
were ravaging the city, panicked people attempting to evacuate really
caused UH an additional problem, which is that there were
bottlenecks forming UH from pedestrian traffic and basically all the
(09:58):
passages away from the city center. So all the bridges,
all the streets, all the alleyways just became impassively clogged
with people, and a lot of people burned to death
as they just stood trapped in these throngs, unable to
move in any direction. Some people tried to bypass the
clogged thoroughfares by jumping into the Cemita River, and a
(10:21):
lot of them drowned while trying to escape the city
this way. UH. Still, others had never even of course
had time to run. They were incinerated in buildings that
went up in flames with incredible speed. The fires kept
burning for up to two days. Yeah, they just did
not have the resources. I mean, if you think of
(10:41):
any even modern city, if a hundred and thirty major
fires broke out in Atlanta today, I think our fire
departments would be hard pressed to get those all under control,
uh in a in a quick manner. So you can
imagine in you know, almost a hundred years ago, with
the technology available at that time, in a tightly crowded city,
(11:03):
how difficult it would have been to put out you know,
what started as a dred and thirty fires and then
I'm sure expanded far beyond that. Well. Then, in addition
to all the flames, the earthquake also caused the tsunami,
which added a whole additional layer of devastation to the
coast of Japan. Yeah. This tsunami reached an estimated uh
(11:24):
thirty nine point five feet in height, which is about
twelve meters, and it crashed into the coastline along Tagami Bay.
And this caused of course additional property damage. It also
killed more people. Cars and even houses were completely swept
away and mud mixed together with ashes in the streets
to create even more mess and devastation. Yeah, just basically,
(11:46):
I mean it's I've seen pictures and we will link
to pictures in the show notes. Some of them are
a little bit difficult to look at if you're sensitive,
But it's just it looks like something almost from a movie.
Like there's almost no frame of reference for me anyway
of like in terms of reality what that must have
been like, Uh, incredibly intense and terrifying. It's very much
(12:10):
an armageddon scenario, you know that would be played out
in modern cinema. But in the days after the disaster,
there was another horrific development that had nothing to do
with nature. It was entirely man made. So three days
after this whole ordeal started, riots broke out in Tokyo.
(12:32):
Some newspapers were accusing Koreans who were living in Tokyo
of looting, and the newspapers insinuated that the Koreans had
started the majority of the fires, and there were also
allegations that groups of Koreans were poisoning the wells. So
many of these allegations are now believed to have just
been mere rumors that were printed by the newspapers. Yeah,
(12:54):
this was a time of you know, a lot of
crazy things going on, and uh presume ofly people were
giving eyewitness accounts to the newspapers that maybe we're not accurate,
and as survivors were struggling to keep going and get
enough to eat and get enough you know, water, in
conditions that would stress anyone to the breaking point. Unfortunately,
(13:16):
Japan's Korean population really became sort of the immigrant scapegoat
and the focus of pent up frustration and grief and
anger and just the shock of what was going on
around all of them. So basically, whether it was true
or not, people believed that gangs of young Korean men
were going through the whole city and pillaging, so counter
(13:38):
gangs formed to patrol and deal out swift punishment. The
yeah um accounts of some of the atrocities that took
place during this time are really very disturbing, according to
one American tourist who had been in the city when
all of this happened. For example, there was a Korean
man who was simply by virtue of being Korean and
(14:02):
thus associated with these crimes that people believed were happening
was tied to a pole and just left there, and
basically he was beaten by all passers by as some
sort of retribution for what they thought he may have
been a part of. There are also some conflicting accounts
about some Koreans who were put onto boats and sent
(14:22):
out into the harbor. And while some versions characterized this
as an attempt to secure the safety of the people
on the boats, others insinuate the intent was to send
these people to their debts. As the boats caught fire
out in the harbor, whether the fires were accidental or
set on purpose, the people who were on the boats died. Yeah,
(14:43):
the um you know, there had been oil barrels and
other um flammable chemicals that were there on the docks
that when the earthquake hit and the additional tsunami, you know,
they were broken apart, and so there was this oily
sheen on the surface of the water which was very,
very flammable. And so there's some accounts that suggest that
(15:06):
people were actually tied up and put on the boats.
Some just say that they were being pushed onto the boats,
as Tercy said, to try to save them, like to
get them away from the city where people were behaving,
you know, out of completely ramped up fear, But we
don't really know. We only know that they all perished.
Japanese socialists were also grouped with the Koreans as traders,
(15:28):
and being identified as a member of either group was
an instant death warrant. People were set upon in the
streets and cut to pieces with swords or clubs to death.
These attacks were just ferocious, and undoubtedly they came from
the stress of the whole situation, but the atrocities then
became a point of shame for a lot of people.
(15:49):
One public official described these incidents as quote a major
defect of the national spirit UH. And in the end,
there were only a hundred and twenty five vigilantes charged
for all of these crimes, even though UH most historical
accouncils say that there were far more than a hundred
and twenty five people involved in UH these beatings and
(16:12):
stabbings that were going on, and out of those only
thirty two of them actually received a formal sentence. UH
were given suspended sentences and the and nine percent of
the homes in Yokohama were damaged or destroyed. Sixty percent
of Tokyo's population also lost their homes. Yeah, the entire
(16:34):
metropolitan area was really plunged into like an epidemic of
homelessness at this point. UH. And on September two, UH,
the U. S. Navy had vessels leaving China to sort
of lead a relief effort to try to help Japan,
and within a week, Yokohama's harbor was filled with ships
bringing relief supplies. The American relief efforts provided twelve point
(16:57):
seven million yen to Japan, and that made up of
roughly se the total aid that they received from other countries.
When you think about how much clean up was required
after all of this destruction, it quickly becomes really sobering.
The clean up alone was monumental, but the whole area
had to be surveyed because property lines were completely erased
(17:19):
along with everything else. So in addition to trying to
clear all of the rubble, which I mean at this point,
you know, the vast majority of these areas were rubble, UH,
and trying to figure out where things had been in
terms of property, there was also the huge problem of
the dead because of the unprecedented numbers of bodies. Again,
(17:43):
remember we're talking about more than a forty thousand people
that died in this tragedy, UH that had to be
cleared and dealt with. The city set up fifteen different
collection centers where bodies could be brought, and they actually
allocated UH sever we all hundred city workers and it
was just their job to sort of collect bodies and
(18:04):
help this effort. And then once the bodies were collected
and they tried to identify as many as they could,
but that wasn't always possible. UH, sites for corpse incineration
had to be established, although the majority of the dead
were all cremated near the area that had been the
most drastically hit by fire. To begin with, one of
the most horrifying things that comes up in account after
(18:26):
account is what the city smelled like during all of this.
So you can imagine, on top of the tragedy and
sort of the shock and the heartache, just dealing with
this really uncomfortable odor everywhere you went that just reminded
you of what was going on. I can't even fathom.
And in spite of this almost unfathomable disaster, there was
also some growth. Tokyo's future was envisioned in the form
(18:50):
of this superlative metropolitan mecca, and there was a national
effort to fulfill this promise of Tokyo's future. And while
any you know saw this as an opportunity to rebuild
Tokyo as a shining, new, modern city, there were a
lot of arguments among government officials and the people about
(19:10):
how that dream would be achieved and what it would
actually look like. You know, it's one thing to say
we want to rebuild it better than ever, but what
that means to different people is going to be different things,
and that caused them strife. Urban planners, social welfare advocates,
there were activists, There were politicians as well as just citizens,
and they in many cases, we're all at odds over
how they were all going to move forward, what sorts
(19:33):
of spaces they needed uh to be included in city planning,
and how funds were going to be allocated. And additionally,
to sort of further complicate this is that while most
people wanted to kind of look at this as a
blank slate, uh, which of course it can't really be,
a lot of the people who had lost everything, that
(19:53):
had survived the disaster really just wanted to try to
go back to their lives as they had been and
rebuild things that way they were, and they weren't so
concerned with trying to build some new, better thing. They
just wanted what they had before. Then there was also
the problem of where the money would come from. There
was a reconstruction bill that was introduced in December of
(20:13):
nine and it proposed a budget of five ninety eight
million yen. This did not meet with a lot of favor.
The budget was only passed after it was reduced by
a hundred and thirty million yen, and in the six
years following the bill's approval, another two d seventy million
yen was additionally unencumbered for the reconstruction effort. But even
(20:35):
that failed to meet even the most austere plans that
were envisioned for the new Tokyo. And there was another
piece of legislation that came about during the December Parliament
meeting UH and that was a law that enabled the
government to take ten percent of each partial of private
property to devote to public space. UH. Landowners who were
(21:01):
going to lose more than ten percent to meet the
logistical needs of city planning would be compensated, but only
for that loss that extended above the ten percent that
had been uh, that this law allowed to be seized.
This law was intended to rebuild the city in a
more logical manner. They wanted to avoid the overly narrow
(21:22):
streets and alleyways that had led to so many thousands
of people being trapped in the fires during the disaster.
But as you can imagine, a lot of citizens petitioned
the government to keep more of their land during all
the property readjustment, so those requests also slowed down the
government as they were reviewed. Yeah, there were thousands of
requests because of course, nobody wants to give up one
(21:45):
tenth of the property they own, even though if it
is for the greater good and for you know, uh
better built city with a more effective, you know, sort
of disaster plan situation. But uh, in the end that
most people lost a chunk of their property. Uh. And
on the whole, this aftermath of the disaster was really
(22:07):
filled with a lot of reflection I think on everyone's part,
particularly government leadership, over the future of not just the
capital city, but the country as a whole. And it
really opened up some dialogues about disaster preparedness and evacuation
planning and city planning to support those ideas, there were
also some possibly surprising negatives that came out of all
(22:29):
this national pride really swelled, but it also there was
a lot of xenophobia that developed. There were alarmist articles
that accused the United States of spearheading the relief effort
to try to humiliate Japan, and this growing unease and
the desire for expansion after the quake is frequently cited
as one of the catalysts for World War two. Yeah,
(22:52):
so it didn't, of course happen all at once, but
it's kind of a lot of historians will point to
it and say, you know, it was this sort of
mindset that led to decision ends that ended up, you know,
with Japan trying to expand into China and that sort
of setting off a lot of these world events. UH.
The disaster also had another sort of benefit, which is
(23:13):
that it's seeded some new areas of scientific exploration. UH.
And it caused a lot of countries, not just Japan,
but Japan did a lot of it to really explore
new ways of predicting earthquakes and other natural disasters. So
when you hear about like experiments done with like uh
animals and their sensitivity to uh tectonic movement. A lot
(23:34):
of that really started because this earthquake happened. So a
lot of the detection systems that we have today, this
was sort of their genesis point where that technology started
to develop and and be uh really focused on by
a lot of countries because as we have gotten bigger
and more metropolitan and built more things, that means more
(23:55):
things that can fall down and collapse and that people
want to try to save if they can ahead of time.
UH So that is the horrific event that happened in Japan.
It sounds so scary when I look at pictures and
like I said, we'll link to them. Ah, I just
I can't imagine it. I can't imagine what it would
(24:16):
be like. I try to think about, like, what what
if that exact same thing? It couldn't be exactly the same, obviously,
but what if a similar thing happened you know where
I live. But I don't even know how you collect
yourself after that. You know, we certainly have had hurricane
disasters happened in the US and in other countries. I
mean there have been other disasters. Uh Kushima disaster in
(24:39):
Japan caused a lot of people to look back on
this event. But ah, it's it's difficult to contemplate. I've
been very quiet because you're waxing pensive. Yeah, it's all
very distressing, it is, and especially I really get obviously
any natural disaster is horrible, but I get very poked up.
(25:00):
It's sort of how humans dealt with it, and and
things got very violent at a time when you know,
of course people would ideally come together and support each other,
but that isn't always how it works when there is
fear in the year. So we will instead switch over
to uh listener mail from our listener Adrian, and she says,
(25:21):
as a French Canadian, I was happy to see your
episodes on the Chef. As someone who received their education
in another province, I think I may be able to
provide a response to a question you posed at the
end of the podcast, wondering how those of us in
other parts of the country learn about him. I really
like this letter, I will interject because Uh, while Adrian
is French Canadian, she did, as she said, get her
(25:43):
education outside of Quebec. So it's an interesting perspective that
we hadn't quite seen before, which is why I wanted
to read this, she says, firstly, it speaks greatly to
the place of Quebec in Canada that I learned more
about its premiers than those of my home province, which
was Manitoba. Uh, it could just be that Quebec premiers
are simply more interesting. However, anyhow, what I did learn
about Duplessy was fairly neutral. We learned that he was
(26:05):
a premier who wielded his power broadly, and the close
associations he had with the Roman Catholic Church. However, much
was done in the context of what was changed during
the Quiet Revolution, which again to interjects that period after
Dupascy was no longer in power. For instance, she says,
we learned about his church affiliations and then about how
(26:25):
secularist Quebec became. I would also be very curious as
to what they learn about Quebec's political history. In Quebec
education of history is so fascinating. Whose history is being taught?
Thought I would drop this note over to YouTube. Yeah,
I mean, she kind of brings up the question that
we always mentioned of. You know, history is told by
(26:46):
many different voices, and they do not always have the
same perspective, and so the story to my mind, usually
the story is found in kind of having all of
the uh, different ways of looking at a thing, and
sort of the details kind of revealed themselves, although there
are always elements that are never really fully clear what
the actual situation was. So thank you for that listener mail.
(27:08):
If you would like to write us, you can absolutely
do that. We've mentioned before that our email address is changing,
uh and that is now history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also connect with us on
Facebook dot com slash history class stuff, on Twitter at
missed in History at missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
and pinterest dot com slash from It's in history. And
(27:30):
if you would like to learn a little bit more
about what we talked about today, you can go to
our parents site, which is how stuff works dot com.
Type the word earthquake into the search bar and you
will get how earthquakes work. So if you'd like to
learn about that and a great many other things, uh
and many of the detection and modern science in that article,
like I said, was sort of seeded by this horrific
(27:52):
tragedy happening. But you can learn about that and a
whole lot more on our website which is how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics because it how stuff works dot com in
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and uh,
today we will start by asking Tracy a question. Have
(00:21):
you ever been in an earthquake? Not that I perceived, well,
you know, because there are small earthquakes everywhere all the time,
and there are earthquakes that are felt in Georgia sometime.
And I remember the last time there was an earthquake
that was felt pretty strongly in Georgia. I was in Massachusetts.
Oh that's right. And so I was seeing all of
(00:43):
these tweets from my friends about the earthquake, and I
was like, I am not there. Well, and they're so
infrequent in Georgia, a lot of us didn't know what
was going on. Like I literally thought that someone had
slammed into like my neighbor's house, like a car had
collided collided with something. Um, and I pretty is to this.
When I was very small, I lived on the Pacific coast,
so I would occasionally experience one, but never like a
(01:07):
huge one. However, people in Japan deal with earthquakes all
the time. Uh, it's no secret that Japan is situated
on one of the most dangerous positions our globe has
to offer. UH. It sits on what's called the Ring
of Fire. And probably most of our listeners know about this,
but just in case they don't, that is a horseshoe
shape that runs sort of around the Pacific Ocean. It
(01:29):
goes from the southern tip of South America, travels north
along the North American Coast, it crosses the Burying Strait,
and then it travels down to New Zealand by way
of Japan. And that sort of odd horseshoe shape actually
outlines the meeting zones of various tectonic plates, and the
Eurasian Plate meets up with the Pacific Plate and the
(01:49):
Philippine Plate and the North American Plate all along where
Japan sits. So as you can imagine, with all of
those plates rubbing together, the country is no stranger to earthquake. UH.
It's actually estimated that Japan has some level of earthquake
at least every five minutes, and that they experience as
many as two thousand quakes each year that are strong
(02:10):
enough for humans to feel them. Twenty of the world's
earthquakes that are classified as magnitude six or greater actually
happened in Japan. And when you consider how much actual
landmass Japan has as compared to the rest of the world,
you really get a sense of what a level of
concentration that is. And today, the Tokyo Yokohama metropolis, which
(02:33):
sits in the Kanto region, is home to approximately thirty
five million people, and it's actually considered to have the
highest earthquake risk of any metro area in the entire world. Uh.
And today we're going to chat about an epic tragedy
that happened in Kanto more than ninety years ago. It's
fairly famous, although I think it's been long ago that
(02:55):
it kind of fades out of people's consciousness. They forget
that this happened, uh if they weren't directly involved in it,
or they don't have a cultural connection to it. So
on September one, Japan basically changed forever. A completely devastating
earthquake obliterated Yokohama and much of Tokyo, and more than
a hundred and forty thousand people were killed. I'm glad
(03:16):
you decided to do this episode because it's been on
my list of things that I wanted us to talk
about for a while. And it also plays a part
in the last Miyazaki movie called The Wind Rizoes that
came out not long ago, which was the latest thing
that made me think we should do an episode on this, uh.
And I haven't seen that movie yet ninety two and
it is it's a really important touchstone in world history, really,
(03:40):
and we'll get to sort of why towards the end
of the episode. But to start off, we will talk
a little bit about Yokohama and Tokyo and where they
were at in terms of development when this all happened.
The port city of Yokohama was once known as the
City of Silk, and it was Japan's first foreign settlement.
It was founded as such in eighteen fifty nine, and
(04:02):
this was a little more than five years after the
U S commodore Matthew Perry, who we mentioned in the
Okeechee episode. We being not me because I was not
here then. Yeah, that was when Sarah and I were together. Yes,
so uh, he landed in Japan and forced the opening
of Japan to the west. Prior to this time, Yokohama
has had existed as just a quiet fishing village, and
(04:26):
between Yokohama's establishment as a foreign settlement, uh and the
early nineteen twenties, the time that we're talking about today,
it really grew extremely quickly. It had developed into a
bustling city. It had a population of about half a
million people. But all of that development that Yokohama had
seen in you know, just six decades, was gone in
a matter of hours the day the great quake hit.
(04:50):
At this time, Tokyo was already the capital of Japan,
and it was a huge metropolitan area that was recognized
as a cultural intellectual hub, and it had also been
ex variencing a huge boon of industrialization in the time
leading up to this. Yes, factories were popping up throughout
the areas which are sometimes referred to as Low Tokyo.
(05:11):
The population density around those factories, in those neighborhoods increased significantly,
and many of the people that were living there were uh,
not surprisingly, factory workers, and many of them were living
at or below the poverty line in law, in homes
that were really kind of subpar in terms of construction.
They were. There were a lot of sort of shacks
(05:33):
and a lot of people living very closely together. So
Tokyo had adopted building methods from the Western world during
the Meiji era and that ran from eighteen sixty eight
and nineteen twelve. But even in spite of this development,
there were still a whole lot of all wooden structures
in the city and that left it extremely vulnerable to earthquakes.
(05:53):
So at eleven fifty eight am on September one, three,
the first shocks of the quake hit, and at this hour,
families were just sitting down to lunch, so people that
had been at work in the morning had gone home
in many cases for the lunchtime hour, and the quake
was reported by survivors as lasting about fourteen seconds, and
(06:15):
in that very short period of time, even though that's
a long time for a quake, most of Yokohama's buildings
were completely brought down just in that first tremor. This
quake originated south of Tokyo, near Oshima Island in the
Sagami Bay, and it was the result of the Philippine
Plate colliding with the much larger Eurasian Plate, and depending
(06:36):
on the source, its magnitude was somewhere between seven point
nine and eight point two, so that's an extremely strong earthquake. Yeah,
in UH that time, even in Tokyo, which is a
little bit north of Yokohama, and they are, as we said,
often grouped together as a metro area. More than half
of the brick buildings collapsed, and an estimated one tenth
(06:59):
of the you steel reinforce structures that still exists that
existed at the time were destroyed. So already, just in
that first UH quake range, there was a whole lot
of destruction. But before we get to the really sort
of harrowing and horrible things that happened, we're going to
do a quick ad from our sponsors so we don't
(07:20):
break up some kind of intense discussion. So to get
to what happened next, Historians agree that while the devastation
of the immense tremors of the earthquake was great, the
true destructive course that day was fire. The timing of
the quake, as I said earlier, striking just as lunch
(07:41):
was about to be served, was basically perfect in its
terrible nous. Uh Overturned stoves which had been finishing up
food prep caused fires throughout the area, and high winds
fueled the fires and helped them to spread and spread
extremely rapidly, so all of those open names that were
being used to prepare you know, the last stages of
(08:03):
lunch basically just caused uh these huge fires, which led
to incredible devastation. The buildings that had survived the tremor
were largely brought down. UH. It was extremely rough. It's
estimated that there were more than a hundred and thirty
major fires just breaking out in Tokyo in the half
(08:26):
hour following the first tremor. So whereas the initial quake
took out most of Yokohama, fires burned Tokyo City center
to the ground. And one of the most sort of
horrifying and heartbreaking aspects of this fire uh. And this,
you know, aftershocks of the earthquake, was the development of
(08:48):
this phenomenon that are called dragon twists, and these are
basically fire tornadoes. There twisters that are nothing but fire.
And for example, one twister of fire swept over a
make shift camp where people had run to seek refuge
after the initial destruction, and they were trapped there and
burned to death by this tornado that went over them.
(09:11):
Five different whirling firestorms swept across the collapsed neighborhoods of Tokyo,
and many eyewitness accounts of this horrible day used the
imagery of hell on earth and their descriptions of the
destruction in the horror. Yeah, if you read any eyewitness
accounts or even people that have you know, sort of
had an oral history handed down through their families, they
(09:34):
will almost all say that the people that talked about
it called it hell. I mean, it really was just
nothing but fire and devastation. And as fires and aftershocks
were ravaging the city, panicked people attempting to evacuate really
caused UH an additional problem, which is that there were
bottlenecks forming UH from pedestrian traffic and basically all the
(09:58):
passages away from the city center. So all the bridges,
all the streets, all the alleyways just became impassively clogged
with people, and a lot of people burned to death
as they just stood trapped in these throngs, unable to
move in any direction. Some people tried to bypass the
clogged thoroughfares by jumping into the Cemita River, and a
(10:21):
lot of them drowned while trying to escape the city
this way. UH. Still, others had never even of course
had time to run. They were incinerated in buildings that
went up in flames with incredible speed. The fires kept
burning for up to two days. Yeah, they just did
not have the resources. I mean, if you think of
(10:41):
any even modern city, if a hundred and thirty major
fires broke out in Atlanta today, I think our fire
departments would be hard pressed to get those all under control,
uh in a in a quick manner. So you can
imagine in you know, almost a hundred years ago, with
the technology available at that time, in a tightly crowded city,
(11:03):
how difficult it would have been to put out you know,
what started as a dred and thirty fires and then
I'm sure expanded far beyond that. Well. Then, in addition
to all the flames, the earthquake also caused the tsunami,
which added a whole additional layer of devastation to the
coast of Japan. Yeah. This tsunami reached an estimated uh
(11:24):
thirty nine point five feet in height, which is about
twelve meters, and it crashed into the coastline along Tagami Bay.
And this caused of course additional property damage. It also
killed more people. Cars and even houses were completely swept
away and mud mixed together with ashes in the streets
to create even more mess and devastation. Yeah, just basically,
(11:46):
I mean it's I've seen pictures and we will link
to pictures in the show notes. Some of them are
a little bit difficult to look at if you're sensitive,
But it's just it looks like something almost from a movie.
Like there's almost no frame of reference for me anyway
of like in terms of reality what that must have
been like, Uh, incredibly intense and terrifying. It's very much
(12:10):
an armageddon scenario, you know that would be played out
in modern cinema. But in the days after the disaster,
there was another horrific development that had nothing to do
with nature. It was entirely man made. So three days
after this whole ordeal started, riots broke out in Tokyo.
(12:32):
Some newspapers were accusing Koreans who were living in Tokyo
of looting, and the newspapers insinuated that the Koreans had
started the majority of the fires, and there were also
allegations that groups of Koreans were poisoning the wells. So
many of these allegations are now believed to have just
been mere rumors that were printed by the newspapers. Yeah,
(12:54):
this was a time of you know, a lot of
crazy things going on, and uh presume ofly people were
giving eyewitness accounts to the newspapers that maybe we're not accurate,
and as survivors were struggling to keep going and get
enough to eat and get enough you know, water, in
conditions that would stress anyone to the breaking point. Unfortunately,
(13:16):
Japan's Korean population really became sort of the immigrant scapegoat
and the focus of pent up frustration and grief and
anger and just the shock of what was going on
around all of them. So basically, whether it was true
or not, people believed that gangs of young Korean men
were going through the whole city and pillaging, so counter
(13:38):
gangs formed to patrol and deal out swift punishment. The
yeah um accounts of some of the atrocities that took
place during this time are really very disturbing, according to
one American tourist who had been in the city when
all of this happened. For example, there was a Korean
man who was simply by virtue of being Korean and
(14:02):
thus associated with these crimes that people believed were happening
was tied to a pole and just left there, and
basically he was beaten by all passers by as some
sort of retribution for what they thought he may have
been a part of. There are also some conflicting accounts
about some Koreans who were put onto boats and sent
(14:22):
out into the harbor. And while some versions characterized this
as an attempt to secure the safety of the people
on the boats, others insinuate the intent was to send
these people to their debts. As the boats caught fire
out in the harbor, whether the fires were accidental or
set on purpose, the people who were on the boats died. Yeah,
(14:43):
the um you know, there had been oil barrels and
other um flammable chemicals that were there on the docks
that when the earthquake hit and the additional tsunami, you know,
they were broken apart, and so there was this oily
sheen on the surface of the water which was very,
very flammable. And so there's some accounts that suggest that
(15:06):
people were actually tied up and put on the boats.
Some just say that they were being pushed onto the boats,
as Tercy said, to try to save them, like to
get them away from the city where people were behaving,
you know, out of completely ramped up fear, But we
don't really know. We only know that they all perished.
Japanese socialists were also grouped with the Koreans as traders,
(15:28):
and being identified as a member of either group was
an instant death warrant. People were set upon in the
streets and cut to pieces with swords or clubs to death.
These attacks were just ferocious, and undoubtedly they came from
the stress of the whole situation, but the atrocities then
became a point of shame for a lot of people.
(15:49):
One public official described these incidents as quote a major
defect of the national spirit UH. And in the end,
there were only a hundred and twenty five vigilantes charged
for all of these crimes, even though UH most historical
accouncils say that there were far more than a hundred
and twenty five people involved in UH these beatings and
(16:12):
stabbings that were going on, and out of those only
thirty two of them actually received a formal sentence. UH
were given suspended sentences and the and nine percent of
the homes in Yokohama were damaged or destroyed. Sixty percent
of Tokyo's population also lost their homes. Yeah, the entire
(16:34):
metropolitan area was really plunged into like an epidemic of
homelessness at this point. UH. And on September two, UH,
the U. S. Navy had vessels leaving China to sort
of lead a relief effort to try to help Japan,
and within a week, Yokohama's harbor was filled with ships
bringing relief supplies. The American relief efforts provided twelve point
(16:57):
seven million yen to Japan, and that made up of
roughly se the total aid that they received from other countries.
When you think about how much clean up was required
after all of this destruction, it quickly becomes really sobering.
The clean up alone was monumental, but the whole area
had to be surveyed because property lines were completely erased
(17:19):
along with everything else. So in addition to trying to
clear all of the rubble, which I mean at this point,
you know, the vast majority of these areas were rubble, UH,
and trying to figure out where things had been in
terms of property, there was also the huge problem of
the dead because of the unprecedented numbers of bodies. Again,
(17:43):
remember we're talking about more than a forty thousand people
that died in this tragedy, UH that had to be
cleared and dealt with. The city set up fifteen different
collection centers where bodies could be brought, and they actually
allocated UH sever we all hundred city workers and it
was just their job to sort of collect bodies and
(18:04):
help this effort. And then once the bodies were collected
and they tried to identify as many as they could,
but that wasn't always possible. UH, sites for corpse incineration
had to be established, although the majority of the dead
were all cremated near the area that had been the
most drastically hit by fire. To begin with, one of
the most horrifying things that comes up in account after
(18:26):
account is what the city smelled like during all of this.
So you can imagine, on top of the tragedy and
sort of the shock and the heartache, just dealing with
this really uncomfortable odor everywhere you went that just reminded
you of what was going on. I can't even fathom.
And in spite of this almost unfathomable disaster, there was
also some growth. Tokyo's future was envisioned in the form
(18:50):
of this superlative metropolitan mecca, and there was a national
effort to fulfill this promise of Tokyo's future. And while
any you know saw this as an opportunity to rebuild
Tokyo as a shining, new, modern city, there were a
lot of arguments among government officials and the people about
(19:10):
how that dream would be achieved and what it would
actually look like. You know, it's one thing to say
we want to rebuild it better than ever, but what
that means to different people is going to be different things,
and that caused them strife. Urban planners, social welfare advocates,
there were activists, There were politicians as well as just citizens,
and they in many cases, we're all at odds over
how they were all going to move forward, what sorts
(19:33):
of spaces they needed uh to be included in city planning,
and how funds were going to be allocated. And additionally,
to sort of further complicate this is that while most
people wanted to kind of look at this as a
blank slate, uh, which of course it can't really be,
a lot of the people who had lost everything, that
(19:53):
had survived the disaster really just wanted to try to
go back to their lives as they had been and
rebuild things that way they were, and they weren't so
concerned with trying to build some new, better thing. They
just wanted what they had before. Then there was also
the problem of where the money would come from. There
was a reconstruction bill that was introduced in December of
(20:13):
nine and it proposed a budget of five ninety eight
million yen. This did not meet with a lot of favor.
The budget was only passed after it was reduced by
a hundred and thirty million yen, and in the six
years following the bill's approval, another two d seventy million
yen was additionally unencumbered for the reconstruction effort. But even
(20:35):
that failed to meet even the most austere plans that
were envisioned for the new Tokyo. And there was another
piece of legislation that came about during the December Parliament
meeting UH and that was a law that enabled the
government to take ten percent of each partial of private
property to devote to public space. UH. Landowners who were
(21:01):
going to lose more than ten percent to meet the
logistical needs of city planning would be compensated, but only
for that loss that extended above the ten percent that
had been uh, that this law allowed to be seized.
This law was intended to rebuild the city in a
more logical manner. They wanted to avoid the overly narrow
(21:22):
streets and alleyways that had led to so many thousands
of people being trapped in the fires during the disaster.
But as you can imagine, a lot of citizens petitioned
the government to keep more of their land during all
the property readjustment, so those requests also slowed down the
government as they were reviewed. Yeah, there were thousands of
requests because of course, nobody wants to give up one
(21:45):
tenth of the property they own, even though if it
is for the greater good and for you know, uh
better built city with a more effective, you know, sort
of disaster plan situation. But uh, in the end that
most people lost a chunk of their property. Uh. And
on the whole, this aftermath of the disaster was really
(22:07):
filled with a lot of reflection I think on everyone's part,
particularly government leadership, over the future of not just the
capital city, but the country as a whole. And it
really opened up some dialogues about disaster preparedness and evacuation
planning and city planning to support those ideas, there were
also some possibly surprising negatives that came out of all
(22:29):
this national pride really swelled, but it also there was
a lot of xenophobia that developed. There were alarmist articles
that accused the United States of spearheading the relief effort
to try to humiliate Japan, and this growing unease and
the desire for expansion after the quake is frequently cited
as one of the catalysts for World War two. Yeah,
(22:52):
so it didn't, of course happen all at once, but
it's kind of a lot of historians will point to
it and say, you know, it was this sort of
mindset that led to decision ends that ended up, you know,
with Japan trying to expand into China and that sort
of setting off a lot of these world events. UH.
The disaster also had another sort of benefit, which is
(23:13):
that it's seeded some new areas of scientific exploration. UH.
And it caused a lot of countries, not just Japan,
but Japan did a lot of it to really explore
new ways of predicting earthquakes and other natural disasters. So
when you hear about like experiments done with like uh
animals and their sensitivity to uh tectonic movement. A lot
(23:34):
of that really started because this earthquake happened. So a
lot of the detection systems that we have today, this
was sort of their genesis point where that technology started
to develop and and be uh really focused on by
a lot of countries because as we have gotten bigger
and more metropolitan and built more things, that means more
(23:55):
things that can fall down and collapse and that people
want to try to save if they can ahead of time.
UH So that is the horrific event that happened in Japan.
It sounds so scary when I look at pictures and
like I said, we'll link to them. Ah, I just
I can't imagine it. I can't imagine what it would
(24:16):
be like. I try to think about, like, what what
if that exact same thing? It couldn't be exactly the same, obviously,
but what if a similar thing happened you know where
I live. But I don't even know how you collect
yourself after that. You know, we certainly have had hurricane
disasters happened in the US and in other countries. I
mean there have been other disasters. Uh Kushima disaster in
(24:39):
Japan caused a lot of people to look back on
this event. But ah, it's it's difficult to contemplate. I've
been very quiet because you're waxing pensive. Yeah, it's all
very distressing, it is, and especially I really get obviously
any natural disaster is horrible, but I get very poked up.
(25:00):
It's sort of how humans dealt with it, and and
things got very violent at a time when you know,
of course people would ideally come together and support each other,
but that isn't always how it works when there is
fear in the year. So we will instead switch over
to uh listener mail from our listener Adrian, and she says,
(25:21):
as a French Canadian, I was happy to see your
episodes on the Chef. As someone who received their education
in another province, I think I may be able to
provide a response to a question you posed at the
end of the podcast, wondering how those of us in
other parts of the country learn about him. I really
like this letter, I will interject because Uh, while Adrian
is French Canadian, she did, as she said, get her
(25:43):
education outside of Quebec. So it's an interesting perspective that
we hadn't quite seen before, which is why I wanted
to read this, she says, firstly, it speaks greatly to
the place of Quebec in Canada that I learned more
about its premiers than those of my home province, which
was Manitoba. Uh, it could just be that Quebec premiers
are simply more interesting. However, anyhow, what I did learn
about Duplessy was fairly neutral. We learned that he was
(26:05):
a premier who wielded his power broadly, and the close
associations he had with the Roman Catholic Church. However, much
was done in the context of what was changed during
the Quiet Revolution, which again to interjects that period after
Dupascy was no longer in power. For instance, she says,
we learned about his church affiliations and then about how
(26:25):
secularist Quebec became. I would also be very curious as
to what they learn about Quebec's political history. In Quebec
education of history is so fascinating. Whose history is being taught?
Thought I would drop this note over to YouTube. Yeah,
I mean, she kind of brings up the question that
we always mentioned of. You know, history is told by
(26:46):
many different voices, and they do not always have the
same perspective, and so the story to my mind, usually
the story is found in kind of having all of
the uh, different ways of looking at a thing, and
sort of the details kind of revealed themselves, although there
are always elements that are never really fully clear what
the actual situation was. So thank you for that listener mail.
(27:08):
If you would like to write us, you can absolutely
do that. We've mentioned before that our email address is changing,
uh and that is now history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also connect with us on
Facebook dot com slash history class stuff, on Twitter at
missed in History at missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
and pinterest dot com slash from It's in history. And
(27:30):
if you would like to learn a little bit more
about what we talked about today, you can go to
our parents site, which is how stuff works dot com.
Type the word earthquake into the search bar and you
will get how earthquakes work. So if you'd like to
learn about that and a great many other things, uh
and many of the detection and modern science in that article,
like I said, was sort of seeded by this horrific
(27:52):
tragedy happening. But you can learn about that and a
whole lot more on our website which is how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics because it how stuff works dot com in
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