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  • Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake by Gregory Smits
  • Jelle Zeilinga de Boer
Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake. By Gregory Smits (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2013) 256 pp. $54.00

In Seismic Japan, Smits describes the long repercussions of the earthquake that destroyed Edo in 1855, showing how artists’ politicization of the event may have played a role in the abolition of Japan’s shogunate. Edo, Japan’s de facto capital, contained the heart and brain of the Tokugawa Empire, an agriculturally based feudal society that had remained relatively stable for more than two centuries. In the early half of the nineteenth century, its stability was threatened by years of crop failures, famine, and local revolts that drained the financial resources of the bakufu (central administration). Discontent assumed a national flavor in 1854, when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry (U.S. Navy) forced the shogun to open a number of harbors to foreign trade. Edo’s citizens became suddenly aware of the military weakness of their government and the ruling samurai, who had been unable to prevent this insult and loss of face.

A year later, on November 11, 1855, rupture occurred along the northeast dipping collisional contact between the Philippine Sea and Eurasian plates. The quake’s magnitude has been estimated as 7.2 on the Richter scale, originating at a shallow depth (c.30 km) directly below Edo. Numerous buildings collapsed and fires spread. The death toll among the more than 1 million citizens was relatively low (about 10,000) because most of the structures were single-story and constructed of wood. The city was badly shaken, however, and so were its social and political foundations.

Many survivors regarded the earthquake and the preceding droughts as attempts by cosmic forces to rectify a society that had moved out of balance. Their deep-seated anxieties were not expressed by looting, riots, or the persecution of minorities but by the printing of numerous pamphlets that found wide circulation. Smits shows how several of them became windows onto Edo’s political and social consciousness—veiled criticism about the status quo. Initially artists depicted survivors ferociously attacking Namuzu, the giant catfish believed to be the cause of earthquakes because of its underground wriggling. Other prints imply Perry’s responsibility; they depict Namuzu disguised as Perry’s black ships entering the harbor.

Sentiments gradually changed. Kashima, the underground deity who was supposed to prevent the Namuzu from wreaking havoc, was demoted; artists replaced him with the solar deity Amaterasu. Some prints suggest a link between Amaterasu and the emperor in Kyoto, expressing a yearning for a return to earlier systems of government. As numerous aftershocks continued to shake the city, public anger transferred to the bakufu, despite the fact that the administrators had done an exemplary job feeding and housing survivors under difficult conditions. In the decade following the earthquake, rural uprisings and urban riots continued unabated, until the shogunate government fell under heavy political [End Page 264] pressure in 1868. The power of the emperor was restored. Edo was renamed Tokyo and became the formal capital of Japan.

Smits concludes that the Ansei Edo earthquake was a catalyzing agent in the political transformation that brought Japan into the modern world. [End Page 265]

Jelle Zeilinga de Boer
Wesleyan University
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