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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2015
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.
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.
1 Reported in http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/tokyo-governor-tsunami-punishment, [accessed 22 September 2015].
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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.
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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.
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