Book review: The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan, by J. Charles Schencking
It is, in many ways, frightening how history keeps repeating itself and how we fail to learn from the past.
by J. Charles Schencking
Columbia U Press
3.5 stars
Julian Ryall
It is, in many ways, frightening how history keeps repeating itself and how we fail to learn from the past.
On September 1, 1923, a magnitude-7.9 earthquake struck eastern Japan, followed by a tsunami, causing about 120,000 deaths and massive destruction in Tokyo and Yokohama. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9 tremor hit northeast Japan and, combined with the tsunami it spawned, killed about 20,000 people.
After the 1923 disaster, there was widespread anger at the authorities' lack of preparedness - and so it was again, after the Great East Japan earthquake 80 years later.
Next came the debate over how Tokyo should be reconstructed. In 1923, the forward-thinkers wanted a radical redesign, with the compulsory purchase of land to make broad avenues and better transportation links in order to turn the capital into a city comparable with London, Berlin or New York. Eventually, however, the old guard prevailed and the reconstruction schemes fell by the wayside.
Similar debate has gone back and forth since the Tohoku tragedy, with suggestions that many of the coastal communities savaged by the quake and tsunami should simply be abandoned - and again, there is the question of money.