Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 by Gennifer Weisenfeld (review)

Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923. By Gennifer Weisenfeld. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012. xvi, 393 pages. $85.00, cloth; $85.00, E-book.

At 11:58 AM on September 1, 1923, an enormous earthquake registering 7.9 in seismic magnitude shook the Tokyo area, including Yokohama and five surrounding prefectures. Newly developed seismographic techniques in Tokyo recorded a total of seventeen hundred separate quakes over three days (p. 50). A giant tsunami rose; fires swept through the area, incinerating some 44 per cent of metropolitan Tokyo and killing—by crushing or incineration—well over one hundred thousand people.

The new prime minister declared martial law for Tokyo and Yokohama and stationed fifty thousand troops around the area for a period of two and a half months, declaring that “extraordinary measures” were necessary to assure public security and order. The army and police force aided the organization and instigation, as well as the actions, of vigilante squads who murdered over six thousand of the twenty thousand resident Koreans in the Kanto region as well as many Chinese. They performed targeted assassinations of important socialist and anarchist leaders, whom they claimed to be social subversives, including the well-known Ōsugi Sakae and his wife Itō Noe. The state then censored and repressed information about the vigilante squads and murders, stressing the benevolence of the state and the innocence of its victims. Home Minister Gotō Shinpei led the reconstruction effort, taking the opportunity of the relatively “clean slate” of the Tokyo landscape to enact a large-scale urban renewal project that transformed the face of Tokyo and its infrastructure, from the construction of main thoroughfares and waterways and sewage lines to bridges and the reallocation of land.

Gennifer Weisenfeld’s new book takes up the topic of the visual representations of the earthquake and its aftermath, in magazines, postcards, comics, photography, films, scientific and planning charts, paintings, and eventually museum and memorial architecture. She shows convincingly that this visual process was part and parcel of the unfolding of the events, as various stakeholders created the version of what was transpiring that suited their own needs. The after-images of the event appropriate existing visual rhetorics of disaster—after all, Tokyo and other places in Japan had been subject to fires and earthquakes long before this one. The images draw on and transmute this visual vocabulary for purposes of mourning, spectacularization, and construction of a national narrative of heroic recovery, as well as at times to criticize social ills. Modernist artists, including members of the Mavo group that were the subject of Weisenfeld’s first book, took up the rupture of the earthquake along with modernity’s transformations to experiment with on-site art projects among the temporary housing “barracks” and newly renovated commercial buildings.

With about two hundred reproductions of color and black and white images on high-quality paper, the book—which weighs in at over 2.5 pounds, as I noticed when I took it on a plane—gives us a chance to peruse and understand many specific examples of visual culture in context. Weisenfeld reads the images for us and places them in the broader, roughly chronological narrative of the earthquake and its aftermath. Particularly fascinating in the prehistory of earthquake representation are the catfish prints (namazu-e) that became popular during the Edo period, especially in the wake of the Ansei earthquake of 1855. Catfish, as Weisenfeld reminds us, “often act strangely before earthquakes, perhaps because they can sense the first small tremors as they swim in the mud close to the ground” (p. 22). In the Edo period, with the rise of mass-produced printed broadsheets (kawaraban) as a source of news and many forms of woodblock printing, both sanctioned and illegal, artists and illustrators generated over four hundred varieties of catfish prints: “People believed that at moments of moral or social crisis, particularly when ‘spiritual reconstruction’ (seishin fukkō) was needed, the catfish would get loose, causing earthquake tremors by...