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Earthquakes in Japan*

Review products

Seismic Japan: the Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake. By GregorySmits. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013, pp. x, 262, £48.95 (ISBN 978-0-8248-3817-1).
The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan. By J. CharlesSchencking. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, pp. xxii, 374, £38 (ISBN 978-0-231-16218-0).
3.11 Disaster and Change in Japan. By Richard J.Samuels. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013, pp. xv, 274, £22.95 (ISBN 978-0-8014-5200-0).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2015

JANET HUNTER
JANET HUNTER*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom Email: j.e.hunter@lse.ac.uk
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Abstract

This review article examines three monographs that make conspicuous contributions to our understanding of major earthquake disasters in Japan from the mid-nineteenth century through to 2011. They focus on different events and different time periods, and ask different questions, but raise a host of shared issues relating to the on-going importance of disaster in Japan's history over the long term. They cause us to consider how seismic disaster is explained, understood, interpreted, and actualized in people's lives, how the risks are factored in, and how people respond to both immediate crisis and longer term consequences. One recurrent issue in these volumes is the extent to which these large natural disasters have the capacity to change—and actually do change—the ways in which societies organize themselves. In some cases disaster may be perceived as opportunity, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that a desire to return to the previous ‘normality’ is a powerful impulse in people's responses to major natural disasters. The review also argues that the issue of trust lies at the core of both individual and collective responses. A lack of trust may be most conspicuous in attitudes to government and elites, but is also inherent in more everyday personal interactions and market transactions in the immediate aftermath of disaster.

Type
Review Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 415 - 435
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of this piece for their constructive comments. My thinking on earthquakes in Japan has also been shaped by discussions at a number of seminars and presentations, and I am grateful to all participants in those discussions.

References

1 Reported in http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/tokyo-governor-tsunami-punishment, [accessed 22 September 2015].

2 For example, Smits, G. (2006). Shaking Up Japan: Edo Society and the 1855 Catfish Picture Prints, Journal of Social History 39: 4, pp. 1045–1077CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smits, G. (2009). Warding off Calamity in Japan: a Comparison of the 1855 Catfish Prints and the 1862 Measles Prints, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 30, pp. 9–31Google Scholar; Smits, G. (2012). Conduits of Power: What the Origins of Japan's Earthquake Catfish Reveal about Religious Geography, Japan Review 24, pp. 41–65Google Scholar. Weisenfeld, Gennifer's (2012). Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923, University of California Press, Berkeley, California, similarly focuses on visual representations of this kindGoogle Scholar.

3 The centre of political rule in Japan in the early modern period was the city of Edo, renamed Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Ansei refers to the era name (nengō) covering the years circa 1854–1860 in the Western calendar.

4 Smits, G. (2013). Seismic Japan: the Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Clancey, G. (2006). Earthquake Nation: the Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity 1878–1930, University of California Press, Berkeley, CaliforniaCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Smits, G. (2014). When the Earth Roars: Lessons from the History of Earthquakes in Japan, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland; Boulder, Colorado; New York, New York; Toronto; and PlymouthGoogle Scholar.

7 Schencking, J. C. (2013). The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan, Columbia University Press, New York, p. 4Google Scholar.

8 Smits’ and Schencking's accounts suggest that ideas of divine punishment were actually more muted in 1855 than was to be the case in 1923.

9 Schencking, The Great Kantō Earthquake, p. 223.

10 For example, Schencking, C. (2006). Catastrophe, Opportunism, Contestation: the Fractured Politics of Reconstructing Tokyo Following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, Modern Asian Studies 40: 4, pp. 833–874CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schencking, C. (2008). The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan, Journal of Japanese Studies 34: 2, pp. 294–334Google Scholar; Schencking, C. (2009). 1923 Tokyo as a Devastated War and Occupation Zone: the Catastrophe One Confronted in Post Earthquake Japan, Japanese Studies 29: 1, pp. 111–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 There are a number of recent publications on the disaster in Yokohama, for example Imai, S. (2007). Yokohama no Kantō Daishinsai, Yūrindō, TokyoGoogle Scholar, which suggest that the experience of the country's main port was in some respects very different to that of Tokyo. Bringing these accounts together would be likely to emphasize the disunity in the response to catastrophe identified by Schencking.

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14 The author's previous works on these topics include Samuels, R. (1983). The Politics of Regional Policy in Japan: Localities Incorporated?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New JerseyCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Samuels, R. (1987). The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New YorkGoogle Scholar; Samuels, R. (1994). ‘Rich Nation, Strong Army’: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New YorkGoogle Scholar.

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16 Schencking, The Great Kantō Earthquake, p. xv.

17 Roy, T. (2012). Natural Disasters and Indian History, Oxford University Press, Delhi, p. 2Google Scholar.

18 Samuels draws on Taleb's concept of ‘black swan’ events in relation to highly improbable occurrences, as does Theodore C. Bestor. See Bestor, T. C. (2013). Disasters, Natural and Unnatural: Reflections on March 11, 2011, and its Aftermath, Journal of Asian Studies 72: 4, pp. 763–782CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Borland, J. (2006). Capitalising on Catastrophe: Reinvigorating the Japanese State with Moral Values Through Education Following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, Modern Asian Studies 40: 4, pp. 875–907CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Olson, M. (1982). The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation and Social Rigidities, Yale University Press, New Haven, ConnecticutGoogle Scholar. For a more recent critique, see Moe, Espen (2009). Mancur Olson and Structural Economic Change: Vested Interests and the Industrial Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Review of International Political Economy 16: 2, pp. 202–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Pereira, A.S. (2009). The Opportunity of a Disaster: the Economic Impact of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, Journal of Economic History 69: 2, pp. 466–499CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Smits, Seismic Japan, Chapter 4.

23 Shōmukyoku, Nōshōmushō (1924). Kantō Chihō Shinsai no Keizaikai ni oyoboseru Eikyō, Nōshōmushō, Tokyo, p. 34Google Scholar.

24 Alexander, D. (1997). The Study of Natural Disasters, 1977–1997: Some Reflections on a Changing Field of Knowledge, Disasters 21: 4, pp. 284–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benson, C. and Clay, E.J. (2004). Understanding the Economic and Financial Impacts of Natural Disaster, Disaster Risk Management Series no. 4, The World Bank, Washington DCCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 ‘March 11—Japan's Zero Hour’, in McKinsey and Co. (ed.) (2011). Reimagining Japan: the Quest for a Future that Works, VIZ Media, San Francisco, p. 9Google Scholar.

26 Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust, Penguin Books, London, p. 361Google Scholar.

27 For social capital in disasters in Japan and Asia, see Aldrich, D. (2012a). Social, Not Physical Infrastructure: the Critical Role of Civil Society in Disaster Recovery, Disasters 36: 3, pp. 398–419Google ScholarPubMed; Aldrich, D. (2012b). Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IllinoisCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aldrich, D. with Sawada, Yasu and Oum, Sothea (2014). Resilience and Recovery in Asian Disasters: Community Ties, Market Mechanisms, and Governance, Springer Press, New YorkGoogle Scholar. For Japan, see Kage, Rieko (2011). Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: the Revival of a Defeated Society, Cambridge University Press, CambridgeGoogle Scholar, which draws attention to the impact of the Pacific War on early postwar civic engagement.

28 I have noted some of these economic problems in the case of the 1923 earthquake in my article: Hunter, J. (2014). ‘Extreme Confusion and Disorder’? The Japanese Economy in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, Journal of Asian Studies 73: 3, pp. 753–773CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Clancey, G. (2012). Japanese Seismicity and the Limits of Prediction, Journal of Asian Studies 71: 2, pp. 335–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Edgington, D.W. (2010). Reconstructing Kobe: the Geography of Crisis and Opportunity, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver and Toronto, p. 102Google Scholar.

31 Quenot, G. (2012). ‘Earthquakes in Early Modern France: from the Old Régime to the Birth of a New Risk’ in Janku, A.et al. (eds), Historical Disasters in Context: Science, Religion and Politics, Routledge, London and New York, p. 107Google Scholar.

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33 Boettke, P. et al. (2007). The Political, Economic and Social Aspects of Katrina, Southern Economic Journal 74: 2, p. 369Google Scholar. Chamlee-Wright, E. (2010). Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery: Social Learning in a Post-Disaster Environment, RoutledgeGoogle Scholar, London, analyses the importance of civil society and market activity in recovery from Hurricane Katrina, downplaying the contribution of government assistance.

34 Patel, S.B. (2010). ‘Introduction: Earthquakes in India’ in Patel, S.B. and Revi, A. (eds), Recovering from Earthquakes: Response, Reconstruction and Impact Migration in India, Routledge, London and New York, p. 13Google Scholar.

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36 For a short comment on this, see Siemens, R. and Gillon, P. (2010). Lessons from the Great Fire of 1906, Risk Management 57: 10, pp. 10–11Google Scholar.