The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus

Volume 21 | Issue 8 | Number 10 | Article ID 5792 | Aug 30, 2023

Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’sGreat Earthquake of 1923
Gennifer Weisenfeld
interactive digital complement to my bookImaging Disaster with a teamof Duke University graduate students led by
Nicole Y. Gaglia. This public website, “Imaging
Kantō,”
servesasbotha historical repository and a platform
for visualizing and curating new online exhibitsof the Great Kantō Earthquake. The core of thearchive is approximately 140 high-resolution
picture postcards depicting the devastating
aftermath of the quake from the David M.
Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at
Duke. Each item includes full Dublin Core
metadata, English translations of text printed
or handwritten on the object, tags, andgeolocation data to plot the image on a map.
Japanese government maps and charts
accessible on the site add further social andeconomic context to the process of urban
disaster and reconstruction represented in the
postcards. Powered by Omeka, the website
employs multiple organizational strategies thataid users in locating specific images while
encouraging dynamic engagement with thematerials. The “Collections” page groups items
by type (e.g., maps and charts), subject matter,or location for easy browsing. Users cannavigate to the “Items” page to view thearchive in its entirety or filter using tags or
search terms. The “Map” page displays a heatmap of all items with geolocation data, allowing
users to see the distribution of images acrossthe Kantō region and the focus on imaging
subjects in particular areas. A now archived
feature of the site (viewable as a video
demonstration created by Yuchen Zhao on the

Abstract: Disaster is an ever-present, andever-timely, issue both in Japan and around theworld. The triple disaster of 3.11 and its
extensive media coverage are a vivid reminder
not only of disaster's critical and catalytic rolein history, but the dynamic agency of images inmediating our experiences of natural or manmade events to produce that history. The 1923
Great Kantō Earthquake, which devastated the
major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well asfive other surrounding prefectures, was one of
the world's worst natural disasters of the earlytwentieth century. In terms of loss of life andmaterial damage, with an estimated 140,000
deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan's
worst national disaster. Having marked the100th anniversary of the quake on Septemberst1 , we have an opportunity to learn anew fromthe media scale of this catastrophe, howdifferent media produce modes of seeing,
understanding, and, eventually, remembering.
Only by analyzing contending visual responses
within disaster communities and how they arecodified into collective memory to form anational narrative can we ultimately
understand how major events like the Great
Kantō Earthquake-or 3.11-become history.

Note from the author
In the spirit of ongoing inquiry, I developed an1

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“Site Demo” page) was a Neatline exhibit that
presented a timeline of georectified historicalmaps detailing reconstruction plans for Tokyo.
An interactive map of Tokyo’s wards overlaid
the historical maps to show the changes to theurban landscape that reconstruction afforded.
This map also indicated the number of items in
the collection that depicted sites in each ward,
throwing into relief image production practices
and reconstruction efforts in the years
following the earthquake.

to produce that history. The 1923 Great Kantō
Earthquake, which devastated the major citiesof Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five othersurrounding prefectures, was one of the world's
worst natural disasters of the early twentiethcentury. In terms of loss of life and material
damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths andcountless homeless, it is still Japan's worst
national disaster. Having marked the 91 th
stanniversary of the quake on September 1 , wehave an opportunity to learn anew from themedia scale of this catastrophe, how different
media produce modes of seeing,
understanding, and, eventually, remembering.
Only by analyzing contending visual responses
within disaster communities and how they arecodified into collective memory to form anational narrative can we ultimately
understand how major events like the Great
Kantō Earthquake-or 3.11-become history.

Original article from 2015: "Imaging
Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture ofJapan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する 東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィ
ジュアルカルチャー"

In the brief excerpt below and the fullmonograph, Imaging Disaster examines
traditional and modern image making practices
from the Ansei-era Edo earthquake of 1855 to
the wartime media event of the Russo-Japanesewar, and then up through the 1923 temblor, theofficial reconstruction of Tokyo in 1930, andeven the atomic bombings of the Asia-Pacificwar, to illuminate the intermedia nature ofdisaster images that all, regardless of medium,process observable phenomena through theimagination, blurring the boundaries between
the real and the fantastic. This promiscuous
commingling of fact, fiction, documentary, andmelodrama to produce the visible evidence ofhistory, reminds us of the inherent scopic
pleasure of disaster spectatorship, and how foreverything that is made visible in the imaging
of catastrophic events, many things are madeinvisible.

Taishō 12.9.1 Actual Conditions of theGreat Tokyo Earthquake: Twelve Stories.

Disaster is an ever-present, and ever-timely,
issue both in Japan and around the world. The
triple disaster of 3.11 and its extensive media
coverage are a vivid reminder not only ofdisaster's critical and catalytic role in history,
but the dynamic agency of images in mediating
our experiences of natural or man-made eventsThe Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina,
the Sichuan and Haiti earthquakes-theexperience of disaster is both universal andparticular. Most of us understand these horrific
events through a complex matrix of media,2

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most of them visual, that attempt to record andascribe meaning to destruction, chaos, andtragedy. Images mediate our experiences. How
the visual functions in relation to disaster,
however, requires close critical examination.
The visual culture of disaster can produce an
exploitative aesthetics of horror and spectaclethat transforms viewers into unwitting voyeurs.
At the same time, people can use images toreclaim disaster sites for social and political
purposes. Images can impart emotional value
to an event by humanizing, heroizing, andmonumentalizing it. They can also erase or
justify aspects of it. Images act on us, or as
W.J.T. Mitchell has written, pictures "want"things from us and for themselves.i

the state's responses to this national
catastrophe. Yet the disaster was not the solepreserve of the state. A range of public andprivate entities, from the imperial household tothe leftist avant-garde, used the earthquake toadvocate their own visions for the future.
Although proceeding from natural causes, the1923 earthquake became a metaphor for therelentless destruction of tradition by modernity.
For many Japanese, the earthquake
recapitulated and accelerated the ruptures anddislocations of modernization, which had been
subjects of intense debate long before thetemblor hit. The disaster not only crystallized
these debates but also demonstrated thefragility of modern society: the greater thetechnological achievement, the more
spectacular its destruction. The shock of thequake became the shock of the modern.

Focusing on one landmark catastrophic eventin the history of an emerging modern nationthe Great Kantō Earthquake that devastatedJapan's imperial capital and its surrounding
areas in 1923-I explore how different media
produce modes of seeing, understanding, and,eventually, remembering. Major disasters focus
the social energy of diverse media on one
critical event. Such moments create a density
and intensity of visuality that make them ideal
to explore the influence of imaging practices.ii
But media do not exist in isolation. As I
demonstrate through the excavation of tropes
and motifs that circulated widely, visual culture
constitutes an intermedia dialogue to which
each medium brings a distinct yet criticalinflection. In 1923, viewers encounteredphotography and film, and visualizations ofscientific information, alongside hand-renderedprints, paintings, sculpture, and cartoons. Theyexperienced a public visual sphere in which
objective and subjective values were
inextricably fused. Images played a central rolein constructing the earthquake as a national
event, rather than simply a local tragedy, thatdemanded solidarity from all Japanese people.
Mass media and new scientific technologies
globalized Japan's tragedy, inviting empathy
from the world. Images of disaster erected aframework of visual authority that legitimatedDisaster images do not emerge ex nihilo,
however; they are part of a cumulative historyof visual production. Images draw from local
genealogies and pictorial traditions that include
secular and sacred representations. As timegoes on, they become imbricated in a global
network of image making. My interest in thisprocess, and the images, spaces, anddiscourses that it produces, has led me to write
this book.
Similarly, disaster is not static. It is an
unfolding temporal landscape within which
visual production must be historicized. In
exploring diverse reactions to the Kantō
earthquake over time, I identify the multiplicity
and changing nature of this traumatic
experience for the Japanese. Only by analyzing
contending visual responses within disastercommunities and how they are codified intocollective memory to form a national narrative
can we ultimately understand how major events
like the Great Kantō Earthquake become
history.iii

3

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(Kantō Earthquake Pictorial), vol.
1, 15 September 1923

The Media Scale of Catastrophe
September 1, 1923, has been
stamped indelibly on the mind of
the Japanese nation, for on thatday, at noon, Tokyo and six otherprefectures in Kanto were visitedby a terrific earthquake, the fire
following which devoured
hundreds of thousands of houses,
destroyed all means ofcommunications, ran up an
incalculable death list, created amillion and a half refugees,
destitute of homes, food, or
clothing, and shattered family ties.

When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha
published its bilingual three-volume
photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō
Earthquake just two weeks after the event, thecalamity had already been captured inthousands of images that circulated on anational and international media highway.
Commercial
photographersandphotojournalists produced the most abundantand immediate images of the quake, whichwere transmitted in newspapers, special-issue
newspaper pictorials, commemorative
photography collections, illustrated survivors'
accounts, and sets of commemorative
postcards. These photographic images
functioned as both news and souvenirs,
rendering their consumers/viewers, inside andoutside the devastated locale, into both
witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news
media and those issued by respected publishinghouses carried the visual authority of supposed
facticity. As such they both produced andbecame the historical record of the event.
These photographs also heroized the vision of
their producers, who pointed out that they hadtaken them "at great risk and sacrifice" toassist the world in comprehending the event.
Many photodocumentary images quickly wentfrom being indexical to iconic through theirrepeated reproduction and circulation, evensetting the grammar for visual responses inother media such as prints and painting. Anintermedia dialogue emerged based on the
purportedverisimilitudeofthephotodocumentary as a touchstone fornarrating the event, but it revealed theinadequacy of any one medium, including the"realistic" mode of photography, to express thetotality of the disaster. I examine how theextensive photodocumentary coverage in themass media allowed people throughout Japan(and throughout the world) to share vicariously
in the plight of Tokyo residents living out a life-

Tokyo and Yokohama, the two
greatest cities in the districts
affected, of whose great buildings
and cultural equipment the whole
nation has been proud, changed
into masses of fire-swept debris,the only remains of the seat ofcivilization of the Far East.
Japan, however, will not succumb
before nature's ravages; such a dayof national calamity marks the
beginning of a test of the nation's
stamina.
The Osaka Mainichi has
undertakentopublishphotographs, taken at great risk
and sacrifice by members of thephotographic corps of the paper, toenable the readers to realize thedamage wrought by the calamity,
and supply the public with a costly
souvenir of the greatest calamity inthe world-a souvenir that can bepassed down through thegenerations.
Foreword to Ōsaka Mainichi
Shinbunsha, Kantō shinsai gahō4

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and-death drama on the streets of the capital, asupreme example of what Paul Virilio has
called "the media scale of catastrophes andiv
cataclysms that dress the world in mourning."
I argue that these visual images helped
collectively produce the event known as theGreat Kantō Earthquake by codifying the tropes
and motifs that would form an enduring visual
lexicon of disaster. By asserting visual
authority, the diverse perspectives of thephotographic eye and its technologicallymediated vision had an enormous impact on
people's perception of the event. Together withthe camera, other scientific and technologizedmodes of visualization, including cartography
and seismography, produced visible evidence tobuttress this visual authority. In its social
impact, disaster photography embodied a civil
contract that forged multilayered power
relationships. It simultaneously inscribed andpointed to the limits of visual authority byrevealing the heterogeneity of viewing
experiences. At a psychological level, theimagery sought to instill national resilience andempathic mourning yet still unavoidably
indulged the eye in the perverse pleasures ofdisaster viewing.

expected to arrest attention, startle, surprise.…
The image as shock and the image as cliché arev
two aspects of the same presence." Yet theimage fatigue of the late twentieth-century
visual world of which Sontag spoke grew out ofa mass culture that was radically different fromthat of the 1920s, when photography stillretained its spectacular aura for mimetic
reproduction and the mass media had been
circulating photographic images of disaster
globally for only a little over three decades. In
1923, the imaging of disaster ultimately
attested to the Japanese nation-state's survival
and its tenacity in the face of adversity. Thiswas highly significant because of theunprecedented, "historic" nature of thecatastrophe. In the first few days after thequake, there were rumors throughout Japanand abroad that Tokyo and Yokohama had been
completely obliterated. Visible evidence proved
otherwise. The cyclical nature of destruction in
Japan precluded an apocalyptic vision, evenwhen the nation was seemingly on the brink of
total annihilation (this would change in the
postwar period after the introduction of theatomic bomb).
The photographic eye is not singular and theprint media are not univocal. In fact, theimaging of the Kantō disaster displays acacophonous world of widely diverging
experiences and objectives, perhaps not
surprising in a heterogeneous society, although
it is not always immediately evident from themany rhetorical efforts to galvanize thepopulace through a moralistic, unifying
discourse of resilience and optimism.
Therefore, one must tease out the strands ofmeaning in these visual representations andascertain how the visual became imbued withsocial significance.

The sublimated iconoclasm of poststructuralism
has generated an overwhelming distrust ofimages and vision in theoretical discourse in
the past few decades. And popular cultural
theorists such as Susan Sontag havemaintained a critical skepticism while
acknowledging the power of images to evoke
empathy for those touched by calamity.
According to Sontag, "Nonstop imagery(television, streaming video, movies) is oursurround, but when it comes to remembering,
the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory
freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image.
In an era of information overload, thephotograph provides a quick way of
apprehending something and a compact form
for memorizing it. The photograph is like aquotation, or a maxim or proverb.…
Conscripted as part of journalism, images wereTechnologies of Seeing and Visible
Evidence
Before the advent of popular radio, print news5

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media were the primary means ofdisseminating information throughout Japan.
For the most part, the Kantō quake destroyed
all telecommunications like the wireless andthe telephone.vi While the publishing industry
and the news media were devastated, they
recovered quickly.vii At least twelve newspapers
were being published in Tokyo at the time, andtwo of the five major papers, Hōchi shinbun
and Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun, were able toresume printing by the fourth day after thequake. Others, such as the Tōkyō asahi shinbun
and Yomiuri shinbun, were up and runningagain by 12 and 15 September, respectively.
However, this brief break did not stop thedissemination of information. Although still
predominantly a regional business, newspapers
from throughout the nation publishedinformation about the quake-some fact, somefiction-that streamed out of the capital. There
were also numerous public official statements(kanpō) providing updates about the areas ofdestruction (including regions surrounding thecapital), locations of refugee facilities, state of
telecommunications and transportation, statusof foreign aid, and activities of international
dignitaries, such as the American ambassador.
Even in the first month after the earthquake,news publications collectively began to parsethe visual lexicon of Japan's massive natural
disaster and to codify the tropes that would
define it.

after the event, the front page pictured large
fissures in the ground, a house roof
dramatically in ruins, and a close-up of
displaced refugees waiting at a train station.
The second page featured Osaka residents
preparing supplies to send to the stricken
region and a pilot boarding his airplane to fly toTokyo to provide assistance. Subsequent issues
had aerial shots of billowing clouds of smokefrom the smoldering landmass of the city andground shots of all aspects of the destroyedviii
cityscape. Some formal portrait lozenges
were scattered throughout the images ofdestruction, spotlighting well-known
individuals who had perished or been injured in
the disaster.
The photographic eye directly affected
perception. Aerial photographs of the damaged
areas dwarfed the people on the ground,emphasizing the expanse of devastation. Such
images inherently express scale and magnitude
and speak more of civilizational and urbanistic
destruction than of individual lives lost.
Photographs of burning land seen at a distancehave their roots in the print images of Edo. For
example, images in Ansei-Era Observations(Ansei kenmonshi) show Edo from a bird's-eye
panoramic view, highlighting large swaths ofbillowing smoke rising from the burning city.
The new heights achieved in aeronautic
technology amplified the vastness of thephotographic gaze and further depersonalized
the connection between viewer anddevastation. They also added a layer oftechnological mediation, interposing theaircraft as well as the camera. Aerial
photography was already an important
strategic technology in war and disasterreconnaissance imaging abroad. The "logistics
of military perception" developed during WorldWar I, according to Virilio, had as much tacticalimportance as the timely supply of ammunition.
As a "watching machine," the aerial camera
turned the photographic eye into a weapon.ix
Moreover, when catastrophe struck, aerial
photography became not merely a reproductive

Some of the earliest press images of thedisaster were from the areas surrounding thecapital and ran in Osaka-based news outlets.
The coverage indicated how difficult it was forjournalists to get close to the center of thedevastated region. It marked the sudden
stream of attention inward toward the capitaland the flow of refugees outward away fromthe devastation. The Ōsaka mainichi shinbun
was one of the first newspapers to publish
photographs of the disaster in a special edition.
With its reporters unable to reach Tokyo, thenewspaper featured scenes of the city ofNumazu in Shizuoka prefecture. On the day6

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technology but also a critical method ofdisaster management: relief operations benefit
enormously from immediate information about
the extent of damage and the unfolding
destruction and are better able to deploy
emergency fire and rescue teams efficiently.
Aerial photography is still a critical means ofidentifying priorities in postearthquake relief
operations, providing information for logisticalplanning and, critically, for determining accessroutes.x

eye by incorporating the wing of the airplane asa framing device. Such views reinforced boththe tremendous expansion of modernity's
vision, literally and figuratively, and its evermore disastrous consequences. Nevertheless,the state again tried to instrumentalize thetotalizing vision of aerial film in 1926, when itsought to demonstrate the success of largescale urban reconstruction in the fifteen-minutefilm Reconstruction of the Imperial Capital
Seen from an Airplane (Kokusen nite fukkō noteito e). (The film was shot by well-known
cameraman Shirai Shigeru and produced by the
Ministry of Education [Monbushō]).xiii Throughmovement, film increased the temporal andspatial expansiveness and impact of the aerial
vision. Yet while the semblance of totality was
useful for the Japanese government, it was
deceptive, because no view could encompass
the full implications of the event or theramifications of reconstruction.

While drawing attention to the devastating
extent of the damage, aerial photography'scommanding view also communicated acontrolling gaze in images of the 1923 quake: if
the disaster could be presented in its totality, it
could somehow be controlled. However, media
efforts to establish a commanding vision also
articulated the limits of such control as criticalsites still in jeopardy remained concealed fromview. On the cover of Asahi Graph's (Asahi
gurafu) special pictorial issue "Full Record of
the Great Earthquake" (Daishinsai zenki) (fig.
1), which proclaimed itself "the most wellorganized record and pictorial report," a single
large official aerial photograph of the burning
capital taken by a naval aircraft shows whitesmoke gusting off the page, obscuring twothirds of the ground.xi The ordered grid of thecity and the pronounced roadways, the only
identifiable details from this height, seem about
to be consumed by the unstoppableconflagration. The same photograph,
reproduced in the Ōsaka asahi shinbun with thecaption "Raging fires consuming the imperial
capital," injects the scene with more ominous
portent by adding the critical descriptive detailthat the white smoke is shrouding the Imperial
Palace-the home of the empire's divine rulerand thereby calling into question the survival ofxii
the nation's leadership.
Some aerial photographs, such as the iconic
photograph of the Marunouchi district that ran
in the Hōchi shinbun (fig. 2), emphasized thetechnological mediation of the photographic
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Figure 2. Marunouchi Seen from an
Airplane (Hikōkiue kara mita
Marunouchi), photograph. Hōchi shinbun,
20 September 1923, A.M. ed., 7. By
permission of Yomiuri Shinbun.
Figure 1. Aerial photograph of the burning
capital, front page. "Full Record of theGreat Earthquake" (Daishinsai zenki),
special issue, Asahi Graph, October 1923.

Figure 3. Map of Tokyo-Area Fires andVictim Gathering Sites (Tōkyō kasai chiikioyobi risaimin shūdan chizu), with hatches
indicating areas of destruction. Dai Nihon8

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Yūbenkai Kōdansha, Taishō Daishinsai
daikasai (The Great Taishō Earthquake
Conflagration) (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yūbenkai
Kōdansha, 1923).

extended the horizon line of the urban ruins,
giving Tokyo the look of a never-ending
postapocalyptic wasteland (fig. 4). These open,
decimated vistas expose recently inhabited land
to the observer and show new views born out ofthe destruction; where a dense metropolitan
cityscape previously blocked the gaze anddirected it along the axes of major boulevards,
now one's gaze can extend for miles
unobstructed. This new visibility is reinforced
through the picturing of areas commonly
known for their urban density and large
buildings: Nihonbashi, Ginza, Maruouchi,
Kanda, and Kyōbashi, for example. In areas
where the burned-out carcasses of monumental
Western-style edifices remained, the viewer can
see through their empty, charred shells into the
distance (fig. 5 top). The known scale of thesebuildings established a visual benchmark forperceiving the magnitude and enormity ofdestruction, and the transformation of thesolid, opaque structures into open screens
reiterates the evisceration of the city itself.

Schematic maps of surviving transportation
networks, refugee facilities, and thedeployment of military personnel throughout
the region affected by the quake also visually
supported the authority of the state by implying
control over a vast area of devastation. Like
aerial photography, such maps were a powerful
logistical weapon. The detachment conveyed by
the scale and magnitude of aerial photography
was echoed in the many chillingly clinicalgeographical mappings of the disaster, which
covered the region with red hatches indicating
the complete destruction of vast, blighted
sections (fig. 3). Many Taishō maps, building on
their increasingly detailed late-Edo precursors,
were scientifically cartographic, delineating theexact layout of the metropolitan area, and thegraphic red hatching overlaid on the schema of
the city is utterly dispassionate in marking thedecimation of nearly half of its land area,
lending visual authority through apparent
xiv
facticity. The technique of blotting out large
areas of the city with red pigment to indicate
fire damage was common in late-Edo mapping.
For example, it appears in the news kawaraban(broadside) maps of fire-blighted areas of Kyoto
destroyed during the Kinmon or Hamaguri
Rebellion (Kinmon no Hen or Hamaguri Gomon
no Hen) of 1864, when the Tokugawa shogunal
forces quashed an uprising by antiforeign
imperial loyalists.xv The 1923 maps refined thispractice. Yet they are not entirely lifeless, forthe small patches of red indicating safe havens
for refugees look eerily like blood
hemorrhaging across the image.

Figure 4. Ningyōchō Street (Ningyōchōdōri), postcard, 1923. Ishii Toshio
Collection. By permission of Japan
Publishing Copyright Association.

In photographs, the subtle differences inperspective among elevated and panoramic
scenes of the devastated cityscape give hints tothe scope of the disaster. Some images visually9

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In contrast to the aerial images, photographs
taken from a ground perspective invited theviewer to identify with figures making their
way through the treacherous rubble (fig. 5bottom). These images reduce the city tohuman scale, thereby acquiring emotional
resonance and allowing the viewer to identify
with the plight of the survivors. In one
photograph (fig. 6), a single male figure holding
an umbrella and walking away into the murky
distance amid the ruins of the formerly
fashionable Ginza district imbues the scene
with pathos. Such images of the city carry a
tragic irony in their contrast with the myriadfamiliar images of well-dressed ladies andgentleman sauntering down the elegant
commercial boulevards of the Ginza, Tokyo's
equivalent of the Champs-Élysées in Paris or
Fifth Avenue in New York. The popular leisureactivity of "strolling in the Ginza" (a practiceknown as ginbura), past its fashionable shops
and department stores, is profoundlytransformed in these photographs; clearly there
was no window-shopping to be done here.
Postquake ginbura was a promenade throughruins.

Figure 5. The Burned Expanse toward
Ginza That Looks like Ruins (Haikyo no
yōna Ginza hōmen no yakeato) (aerial view,top); Burned Skeletal Remains of Trams
and Cars Lying across the Road (Zankotsu
o romen ni yokotaeta densha to jidōsha)(ground view, bottom), photographs. Ōsaka
Asahi Shinbunsha, Daishinsai shashin gahō
(Photographic Pictorial of the Great
Earthquake), vol. 2 (Osaka: Ōsaka Asahi
Shinbunsha, 25 September 1923), 9.

The Postcard Album as Visual Archive
To supplement the excerpt above, I would liketo offer a close-up view of a valuable visualarchive for disaster: the postcard album. Afterthe Great Kantō earthquake there was abooming market for disaster postcards. Newswas often indistinguishable from souvenirs, andthe same photographs were widely circulated
in the form of commemorative postcards, often
sold in sets. Postcards were introduced toJapan in 1873 with the new national postal
system. They were a vivid symbol of Japan's
modernity, marked by the inauguration of a
new communications system in the Meiji
period. Already a very popular medium for
depicting scenes from the Russo-Japanese War(1904–5), postcards of natural disasters were

Figure 6. Ginza Street (Ginza dōri),showing a lonely figure on the oncefashionable boulevard, postcard, 1923.
Ishii Toshio Collection. By permission ofJapan Publishing Copyright Association.

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commonplace in Japan by the time of the 1923
quake. Extant envelopes for sets indicate that
Kantō earthquake postcards were produced far
and wide, from Hakata on the southern islandof Kyushu to Osaka in the western Kansai
region. Printed in collotype, offset, andgravure, many photographic postcards, alongwith original photographic prints, werecommissioned by Tokyo publishers (hanmoto),
which had been burned out of business but
recognized the potential profit in earthquake
images. Hundreds of varieties of postcards
were issued. Publishers sold most of them on
the street, and many of the images sold out
quickly. The intimate, pocketsize format of thepostcard lent itself to personal consumption.
Since the vast majority of 1923 disasterpostcards that survive have no writing on them,
they were likely treated more as collectibles
than as a form of postal communication. Many
were put into albums, creating new ways tocombine images and create visual cultures ofdisaster for home viewing. Accordion-style
albums, such as the example pictured here,
allowed for personalized, serial organization ofimages that produced unique, imagistic
narratives of the event. The album pages werealso two-sided and could be stretched out toview a series of images on recto and verso (fig.
7). These miniature collections form individualarchives that provide vivid windows into theearthquake viewing experience.

Figure 7. Example of a postcard album.

Figure 8. The Actual Wretched Conditionsof the Great Tokyo Earthquake: Ginza
Street seen from an Airplane.

Figure 9. Metropolitan Police Department
and the Imperial Theater in the Ferocious
FlamesPostcards mirrored the photographic eye in the
pictorial volumes, surveying the damage bothfrom distant aerial perspectives (fig. 8) andfrom the ground (fig. 9). However, they often
distinguished themselves through thewidespread addition of color, which was
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thought to enhance the verisimilitude while
aestheticizing the image. Although still
photographs could not capture the spectacle ofthe quake in real time, hand or machine
application of color tinting to black-and-white
images that were mass printed sought toprovide an immediacy and layering to theotherwise largely static scenes. The dynamic"ferocious flames" (mōka) were added tophotographic postcards to lend movement to
the images, yet the stillness of the pictures
speaks of an inability to reenact the event in a
temporal or visceral way; rather, it reinforces
the irretrievability and distance of history.
Similarly, images of streets engulfed in flames,
tinted to communicate imminent danger andterror, are perhaps more striking because of
their inability to convey the true nature of theexperience.

Figure 11. Corpses lined up for
identification after the earthquake

Figure 12. Taishō 12, 1 September,
11:58a.m. Great Tokyo Earthquake
Yoshiwara.
Figure 10. Taishō 12. 9. 1 (Great Tokyo
Earthquake) Pitiful Azumabashi Bridge
Destroyed by Fire and Before the Quake.

Other postcards make the before-during-andafter temporal frame of the disaster explicit bysuperimposing inset photographs of famoussites before their spectacular destruction suchas seen in this dramatic pair of images showing
the fate of Azumabashi bridge in Asakusa
violently twisted by the temblor and engulfed inflames (fig. 10).
Photographic representations of mass carnage
were repeated throughout the locales of thecity, particularly in postcards, emphasizing the12

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APJ | JF

widespread loss of life, capitalizing on thetragedy, and inflaming public sentiment (fig.
11). The voyeuristic relationship between theviewer and the image, the living and the dead,is thrown into greater relief in a widely
circulated news and postcard image of thepond in the Shin Yoshiwara licensed
prostitution quarter (fig. 12), where thousandsof women who worked in the brothels perished,unable to get out of the gated district. Like
many victims throughout the city who sought
refuge from the fires in the extensive
waterways of Tokyo, numerous women of
Yoshiwara drowned or were literally boiled
alive when they fled into the district's large
pond Benten ike.

Figure 14. Taishō 12. 9. 1 Actual
Conditions of the Great Tokyo Earthquake:
Nippori Train Station. Refugees on theplatform trying to flee the city.

Figure 13. (Taishō 12, 1 September) The
Great Kantō Earthquake: Great Chaos of
Refugees in the Vicinity of Ueno Station.

Figure 15. (Taishō 12, 1 September)
Wretched Conditions of the Great Tokyo
Yokohama Earthquake. Refugees at Ueno
Hirokōji.

Images of refugees focused on oceanic crowds
fleeing the destruction and raging fires (figs.
13-14), and on more intimate, sympathetic
portraits of family groups, particularly mothers
and children, gathered in temporary shelters(fig. 15).

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Notes

technology as a priority mode of
telecommunications. Joshua Hammer,
Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923
Earthquake and Fire That Helped Forge thePath to World War II (New York: Free Press,
2006), 178–88.

i

W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The
Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2005).
ii

I use the term visuality here to indicate "thesocial construction of the visual field, and thevisual construction of the social field,"reciprocal processes that structure thesubjectivity and agency of the viewing public.
W.J.T. Mitchell, "Responses to Mieke Bal's'Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual
Culture' (2003): The Obscure Object of Visual
Culture," Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 2(2003): 252. For an expanded discussion ofvisuality and visual studies, see Mitchell,"Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,"
Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (August
2002): 165-81.

vii

Shinbun Shiryō Raiburarii, Kantō Daishinsai(Great Kantō Earthquake), vol. 1 (Tokyo:Ōzorasha, 1992).
viii

Because of the difficulties getting access tothe devastated Kantō region, aerial
reconnaissance was critical in relaying
information about the nature and extent ofdamage to coordinate external relief
operations. The Japanese army flew thesemissions out of its base in Nagoya. J. Charles
Schencking, "1923 Tokyo as a Devastated War
and Occupation Zone: The Catastrophe One
Confronted in Post Earthquake Japan,"Japanese Studies 29, no. 1 (2009): 117n35.

iii

Collective memory tends to reflect masternarratives of an event forged by leading socialand political groups to become "dominant
memory." Daniel J. Sherman, The Constructionof Memory in Interwar France (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7.

ix

Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics ofPerception (London: Verso, 1989), 1–3, 11.
xIllah Nourbakhsh et al., "Mapping Disaster
Zones," Nature 439, no. 7078 (2006).

iv

Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity (London:
Thames & Hudson; Paris: Fondation Cartierpour l'art contemporain, 2003), 63.

xi"Daishinsai zenki" (Full Record of the Great
Earthquake), special issue, Asahi Graph,
October 1923; Nihon Shinbun Hakubutsukan,ed., Daishinsai to hōdō-ten: Kantō daishinsai
80-shūnen kikaku (Exhibition of the Great
Earthquake and the News: Plans for the 80th
Anniversary of the Great Kantō
Earthquake)(Yokohama-shi: Nihon Shinbun
Hakubutsukan, 2003), 29.

v

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003),
22–23.
vi

The earliest information about the disasterwas sent by wireless from survivors on ships
moored at Yokohama. This information was
relayed throughout the country and abroad
through the heroic efforts of local
telecommunications operators in regional
stations throughout Japan, particularly theoperator at the Iwaki wireless station in
Fukushima. The Kantō earthquake dramaticallydemonstrated the importance of wireless fornational security, and Japan's experience
convinced many governments to fund thexiiŌsaka Asahi Shinbunsha, Daishinsai shashingahō (Photographic Pictorial of the Great
Earthquake) (Osaka: Ōsaka Asahi Shinbunsha,
15 September 1923), 1:3.
xiii

Shirai Shigeru (cameraman), Reconstructionof the Imperial Capital Seen from an Airplane(Kokusen nite fukkō no teito e) (Tokyo: Ministryof Education, 1926). Kamera to jinsei: Shirai1421 | 8 | 10

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Shigeru kaikoroku (Camera and Life: The
Memoirs of Shirai Shigeru), (Tokyo: Yuni
Tsūshinsha, 1983), 51–58.

Hakubutsukan Chōsa Hōkokusho, vol. 10(Tokyo: Tōkyō-to Edo Tōkyō Hakubutsukan:
Tōkyō-to Rekishi Bunka Zaidan, 2000), 41, 190;
Kinoshita Naoyuki et al., Nyūsu no tanjō:
Kawaraban to shinbun nishikie no jōhōsekai/The Birth of the News, Visual Media in
19th-Century Japan, Tōkyō Daigaku korekushon(Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Sōgō Kenkyū
Hakubutsukan, 1999), 162–63, 78–79; Miyata
Noboru and Takada Mamoru, Namazu-e:
Shinsai to Nihon bunka (Catfish Pictures:
Earthquakes and Japanese Culture) (Tokyo:
Ribun Shuppan, 1995), 78–79.

xiv

Edo-period earthquake maps werepredominantly topographical maps that
communicated the location of fires orschematic maps of the layout of the city aroundthe shogunal castle that had arrows indicating
the direction of fires, which were called"direction marker maps" (hōkaku-zuke). Tōkyōto Edo Tokyo Hakubutsukan Toshi Rekishi
Kenkyūshitsu, Kantō Daishinsai to Ansei Edo
Jishin (The Great Kantō Earthquake and theAnsei Edo Earthquake), Tōkyō-to Edo Tokyo

xv

Kinoshita et al., Nyūsu no tanjō, 175–77.

This article is part of the Special Issue: The 100th Anniversary of the 1923 Great Kantō
Earthquake. See the table of contents here.

Gennifer Weisenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor in the Departmentof Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. from
Princeton University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history,
design, and visual culture. Her first book Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde,
1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art
and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. Her second
book Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of
1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how
visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan's worst national disaster of
the twentieth century. And her most recent book Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air
Defense in Wartime Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023) explores the multilayered
construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air
defense in the 1930s and 40s. In addition to co-editing the volume Crossing the Sea: Essays
on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu, with Gregory Levine and Andrew
Watsky (Princeton University Press, 2012), she has written a core essay on MIT’s awardwinning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido company’s advertising design. She iscurrently completing a new book on the history of Japanese advertising and commercial
design titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire inModern Japan (forthcoming Duke University Press).

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