‘Earthquake and fire destroyed the greater part of Tokyo. Thoroughgoing reconstruction needed. Please come immediately if possible, even if for a short stay.’ So cabled Viscount Gotô Shinpei, former mayor of Tokyo (1920–1923) and current Home Minister to his long-time friend and Director of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, Charles A. Beard. Six days earlier, on 1 September 1923, an earthquake with an estimated magnitude between 7.9 and 8.2 devastated much of Tokyo and the surrounding Kantô region. The quake and the resulting fires, conflagrations that burned for over two days, destroyed nearly 70% of all structures in Tokyo, inflicted damage with a monetary cost upwards of 5.5 billion yen, killed more than 120,000 citizens, and rendered just over 1.5 million people homeless: it was an urban catastrophe surpassed in scope only by the devastation wrought by aerial bombing during the Second World War. The Kantô Daishinsai was Japan's most deadly, economically costly, and physically destructive natural catastrophe in history. Within a world history context moreover, the 1923 earthquake was one of the most devastating and disruptive natural disasters of the 20th century, yet it is also one of the least studied.
Similar to the romanticized images that Manchuria would evoke with Japanese citizens looking for a better life in the 1930s, but on a larger geographical scale and over a longer chronological period, the Nan'yô, or South Seas, conjured up a multiple of idyllic visions within the imaginations of many Japanese. In Japanese perception over the course of the Meiji and Taishô periods, the Nan'yô became a region as diverse and as expansive as the interests and energies of those who directed their attention toward it. To disenfranchised ex-samurai, it was a warm tropical paradise, a territory in which to gain personal achievements and fulfill a sense of adventure. Politicians, journalists, and patriots hoping to plant the Japanese flag for national glory mistakenly viewed the South Seas as the one area untouched by Western imperialists and thus the optimal place for the new nation of Japan to acquire territories. On the other hand, certain entrepreneurs came to view the South Seas as a resource-rich economic treasure house, an area waiting to be exploited through commerce and industry.
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