The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1872-06-01 00:00:00

THE GREAT FIRE IN JAPAN.

The Japan Evening Moil in reporting the great fire which
occurred at the capital on the 31 of April. remarks that—
. ..

Two square miles of a crowded city are laid waste ;
30,000 persons are rendered homeless; 10,000 houses
have been burnt, and from 250 to 350 persons have been
killed :—" The fire, from all that can be learnt, broke
out at 3.15 pm. on Wednesday in an aidzu yashiki
within the second moat of the Castle. A gale was
raging at the time, and the sparks and burning shingles
spread far and wide. Suddenly the fire jumped, as
it were, the two moats, the intervening roads,
and a whole block of houses, and then struck a
Japanes.: house, and with almost the speed of
lightening rushed onward towards the Tokaido.
Meanwhile the fire also worked in the other direc-
tion against the wind and burned up the block of
houses which had before escaped. The space between
the Castle and the Tokaido is now nothing but a heap
of ruins, with here and there a mud godown standing
uninjured like the ghost of the houses which before
surrounded it. Not one stone remains standing on
another, not one house has escaped the general destruc-
tion; from the Nihon Bashi downward in a line wi:11
Tiskidji, and from the Castle to the sea is one bark
field of desolation and ruin. Crossing the Tokaido
the houses have been burnt in every direction, and
the people, rendered houseless, have camped out.
i
Dejected and sorrowful they sit n groups round a mat '
or blanket on which is spread a little food; their
misery is indeed terrible to witness, and yet with the
thousands who are houseless it is impossible for any but
government to administer relief. The scene witnessed
by those who were in Yedo during the fire was horrible
indeed. An eye-witness tells us that at 3.15, when the
fire broke out, no one thought anything of it; but as
it leaped from block to block, tiring at several places at
once, the danger was felt to be imminent. The troops
in the Yedo Hotel were sent in to a place of safety, and
several foreigners living in the French Hotel removed
their baggage to a foreign settlement. Another gentle-
man, who was near the Castle at the outbreak of
the fire, saw at least fifty persons carried by on
stretchers, nearly all dead ; while a third witness,
who was in Tskidji, saw great numbers dead by
suffocation or fire. Mothers threw their children
away from them— into the water to be drowned or
on to the ground to be burnt—and rushed on to save
themselves. Two-sworded men drunk with excitement
cut and hewed in all directions, and the men who were
seen disabled by sword cuts were too numerous to
count. In contradistinction to this, daughters were
to be seen carrying their fathers and mothers away,
children just old enough to understand what was going
on helped to save their parents from destruction, and
, what was more touching than all was to see in the dis-
tance people fall under their burdens to be overtaken
by the flames, before they could rise. About 10,000
houses were burnt, placing 50,000 people in the open
at the lowest calculation. The loss of property must
r exceed a couple of millions of dollars."