It arrived at 11:58:44 am, on September 1, 1923, just as citizens of Tokyo and Yokohama were preparing to take their noon meal. The strong shaking lasted four minutes, but the earthquake and its aftermath had a lasting impact on Japan. With over 800 aftershocks, thousands of landslides and days of fire, nearly 142,000 people perished in the Great Tokyo earthquake and fire.
The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Great Tokyo earthquake and fire. Over the past decades PEER researchers have exchanged visits and interacted with researchers in Japan, investigating many aspects of the 1923 earthquake and the catastrophic fires that followed. The PEER-NISEE library is a great resource for this event, with over 200 items including rare manuscripts and images. “Aftershocks, Photographs of the 1906 San Francisco and 1923 Tokyo Earthquake,” authored by Chuck James (former NISEE Library Director), Susan Fatemi (former Library Cataloger), and Hoang Le (formerly student working at NISEE library) provides stunning photographs and many first-hand accounts of this earthquake. It has been digitized recently by Christina Bodnar-Anderson (Librarian, PEER-NISEE Library), and is available for free download.
To mark this event, PEER Visiting Scholar Charles Scawthorn has co-authored a paper, scheduled to appear in a Special Issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America in September. The paper Kantō Daikasai - The Great Kantō Fire following the 1923 Earthquake, by Charles Scawthorn (PEER), Tomoaki Nishino (DPRI, Kyoto University), J. Charles Schencking (Dept. History, Hong Kong University) and Janet Borland (Dept. History, International Christian University, Tokyo) provides a detailed account of the fire and its aftermath, and will be released on September 12, 2023.