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The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II
Free Press
September 2006
On Sale: August 29, 2006
336 pages
ISBN: 0743264657
EAN: 9780743264655
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
Yokohama Burning is the story of the worst natural
disaster of the twentieth century: the earthquakes, fires,
and tsunamis of September 1923 that destroyed Yokohama and
most of Tokyo and killed 140,000 people during two days of
horror. With cinematic vividness and from multiple
perspectives, acclaimed Newsweek correspondent Joshua Hammer
re-creates harrowing scenes of death, escape, and rescue. He
also places the tumultuous events in the context of history
and demonstrates how they set Japan on a path to even
greater tragedy. At two minutes to noon on Saturday,
September 1, 1923, life in the two cities was humming along
at its usual pace. An international merchant fleet, an early
harbinger of globalization, floated in Yokohama harbor and
loaded tea and silk on the docks. More than three thousand
rickshaws worked the streets of the port. Diplomats,
sailors, spies, traders, and other expatriates lunched at
the Grand Hotel on Yokohama's Bund and prowled the dockside
quarter known as Bloodtown. Eighteen miles north, in Tokyo,
the young Prince Regent, Hirohito, was meeting in his palace
with his advisers, and the noted American anthropologist
Frederick Starr was hard at work in his hotel room on a book
about Mount Fuji. Then, in a mighty shake of the earth, the
world as they knew it ended. When the temblor struck,
poorly constructed buildings fell instantly, crushing to
death thousands of people or pinning them in the wreckage.
Minutes later, a great wall of water washed over coastal
resort towns, inundating people without warning. Chemicals
exploded, charcoal braziers overturned, neighborhoods of
flimsy wooden houses went up in flames. With water mains
broken, fire brigades could only look on helplessly as the
inferno spread. Joshua Hammer searched diaries,
letters, and newspaper accounts and conducted interviews
with nonagenarian survivors to piece together a
minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe. But the author
offers more than a disaster narrative. He details the
emerging study of seismology, the nascent wireless
communications network that alerted the world, and the
massive, American-led relief effort that seemed to promise a
bright new era in U.S.-Japanese relations. Hammer
shows that the calamity led in fact to a hardening of racist
attitudes in both Japan and the United States, and drove
Japan, then a fledgling democracy, into the hands of radical
militarists with imperial ambitions. He argues persuasively
that the forces that ripped through the archipelago on
September 1, 1923, would reverberate, traumatically, for
decades to come. Yokohama Burning, a story of
national tragedy and individual heroism, combines a dramatic
narrative and historical perspective that will linger with
the reader for a long time.
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