Now and Then 13

Nogezaka: After the Big Earthquake (1923) - Today

"Rain lashed Yokohama in the early morning of September 1, 1923. By nine o'clock the rain stopped and the sky cleared. But shortly before noon the earth rumbled like distant thunder. Then the ground heaved in waves. The earth shook for four minutes.

The epicenter of the quake, with a magnitude of 7.9, was beneath Sagami Bay. It was powerful enough to have been felt throughout almost all of Japan.

Yokohama's premier buildings were made of brick, a material promoted for construction after the 1866 fire. But the brick construction of the time could not withstand a strong quake (...) Sam Robinson, Captain of the 'Empress of Australia', observed from his ship bridge all the buildings on the Bund dissolve as if built of sand.

The quake struck at 11:58, just as families were preparing meals in charcoals stoves. Embers set paper-and-wood houses ablaze (...) The firestorm was so intense that it rained the city's printed matter down upon the Boso Peninsula across Uraga Strait (...)

Captain Robinson, as soon as the dust settled and he saw the annihilation of the city, decided to turn the 'Empress of Australia', about to leave the port, into a relief ship. Many refugees owed their lives to this decision.

In Kannai, people fled the flames to Yokohama Park. En route to the park many burned to death or drowned in canals because bridges had collapsed. Water from burst mains flooded the park, and refugees stood knee-deep in water. Flames gradually enclosed the park. Some refugees risked the flames for fear of drowning. But the water rose no higher and kept the flames from the park. The park was a life-saving refuge for 50,000 people (...)

Otis Manchester Poole, a long-time Yokohama resident left a first-person account of the earthquake and its aftermath. Having returned to Yokohama from his Kobe refuge a week or so after the calamity, he saw everywhere 'charred corpses, pathetic shrunken mummies. The canals, docks and slips were filled with bodies, bloated to an orange shapelessness, scattered amongst masses of rubbish that choked every waterway. Here and there the funnels sunken launches protruded from the scum. Many of the bodies of Japanese which still littered the streets were being methodically collected into piles of four or six and crudely, though with surprising completeness, cremated under sheets of corrugated iron laid across them.'

Yet there was comic relief. A French woman happened to be bathing in her room on an upper floor of the Oriental Hotel when the building collapsed leaving her exposed in the tub held up by the plumbing. A passerby heard the screams and clambered up to the pipes to rescue her.

People tend to think of the earthquake as the 'Tokyo earthquake'. But Yokohama suffered proportionately more than the capital. Of its 99,840 houses, only 4,957 were undamaged. Of a population of 448,472 , 21,384 were killed and 1,951 were missing. The national government, too, took a Tokyo-centric outlook, and in reconstruction funding favored the capital at the port's expense."

(Burritt Sabin, 'A historical guide to Yokohama', ed. Yurindo, Yokohama, 2002, p. 283-285)