Bracing Japan: Earthquakes, Nature, Planning, and the (Re)Construction of Japan, 1923-1995
THESIS
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Keegan Cothern
Graduate Program in East Asian Studies
The Ohio State University
2016
Master's Examination Committee:
Philip Brown, Advisor; Ying Zhang; Nicholas Breyfogle
Copyright by
Keegan Cothern
2016
Abstract
Japan has been called, both internally and externally, an earthquake country. 10-
20% of the world's major earthquakes (magnitude 6 or greater) afflict a nation that comprises less than a single percent of the world's overall area. Such earthquakes have claimed the lives of around 165,000 Japanese in the past century, while the largest four events alone devastated some $450 billion worth of property. Yet, the Japan of today is hailed by international media to be a particularly earthquake-resilient nation with many advanced mitigating technologies and frameworks for planning and countermeasures to help lessen the impact of future seismic events. An examination of Japan's longer history, however, reveals an uneven implementation of lessons from previous disasters, be they in the form of city planning, the use of technology, or the management of environmental risk. Additionally, the same day-to-day technologies, buildings in which humans live and work, however have themselves long posed the greatest risk to lives during seismic events. Built urban environments in which humans and buildings are clustered are by definition the most dangerous during a disaster. Japan especially also has space limitations within urban environments due to the nature of its islands.
Only beginning after a major disaster in 1923 did the Japanese start to codify seismic building provisions and pay more attention to city design. Though historians to date have written on individual earthquakes, what changes or preparation that occurs during the gaps in between seismic events are just as important. Thus, taking a period ii from 1923 to the last major earthquake of the twentieth century near Kobe in 1995 will demonstrate over a longer period the complex historical process of building and planning to mitigate against potential major earthquake disasters that may or may not ever happen.
More broadly, earthquakes demonstrate the agency of nature in a swift and violent manner, and in the case of urban environments, display the convergence of decades of human choices and the contingency of space and time. Historians must further explore how day-to-day and high technology continues to interact with the natural environment all around us, as well as continuing to complicate the narrative of technological progress.
Globally, tolls of natural disasters in recent decades have risen sharply as the world's population transitions to a majority urban one, making the study of responses to them increasingly important. Bracing Japan is a critical part of this whole.
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Dedication
To my parents, family, and friends, who supported me even when prospects were grim.
iv
Acknowledgments
This thesis is the culmination of two years at Ohio State University. I have accomplished my main goals only with the aid of the talented faculty at OSU, who have rounded out my abilities and character. Funding for my time at OSU was made possible by two academic year FLAS grants, as well as a summer grant to study Japanese abroad.
In particular, I wish to thank my advisor Philip Brown for being instrumental in the growth of my knowledge as a historian of Japan as well as being a kind advisor and a pleasure to work with. Additionally, Ying Zhang has been ever supportive and challenging me to push my boundaries. Nick Breyfogle also made some critical additions to my thesis. The language faculty at OSU and the Inter-University Center in Yokohama helped first get me back on track and then out researching in Japanese. Mari Noda-sensei deserves special recognition for helping me get started doing research. A variety of faculty in non-historical fields have added to my knowledge of East Asia as a whole, which will surely serve me in the future. My fellow East Asian Studies graduate students with whom I have bonded over the course of our mutually-busy schedules have helped keep the grad school experience in perspective.
Finally, my parents and extended family have helped keep me going in more ways than I can count. I would not be here without you.
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Vita
2010...... B.A. English Literature, Boise State
University
2012...... M.A. History, Boise State University
2016 ...... M.A. East Asian Studies, The Ohio State
University
Fields of Study
Major Field: East Asian Studies
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Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii
Dedication ...... iv
Acknowledgments...... v
Vita ...... vi
Introduction ...... 1
Chapter 1: Japan's Premodern Legacy, Early Earthquake Mitigation and Prediction
Efforts, and the Disaster of 1923 ...... 16
Chapter 2: Lessons Learned and Forgotten: The Pacific War and Postwar Expansion... 38
Chapter 3: The Kobe Earthquake and Beyond ...... 56
Epilogue ...... 73
Conclusion ...... 77
References ...... 80
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Introduction
Japan has referred to itself as the “world’s foremost ‘Earthquake Country.’” 1
Situated between four major tectonic plates, where the Philippine Plate is slowly being jammed underneath the North American and Eurasian Plates a few centimeters per year and creating the potential to release massive amounts of energy, Japan lies in a particularly earthquake-prone area. The Headquarters for Earthquake Research
Promotion in Japan notes that “It is said that Japan has been struck by approximately ten percent of the world’s earthquakes. This is despite its small area, being less than one percent of the world’s total land area.” 2 While major earthquakes (M 6.0+) don’t occur on a daily basis, Japan has historically been the site of some of the world’s largest, most deadly, and most expensive disasters. In the past century alone, earthquakes have claimed the lives of around 165,000 Japanese and devastated some $450 billion worth of property.
It should therefore come as little surprise that the Japanese have had a long, albeit uneven, institutional history of attempting to mitigate damage directly and indirectly caused by earthquakes.
When the 3/11 Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in 2011, the international media was quick to jump in and praise overall Japanese preparedness and technology.
1 The Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion, Let's Learn About Earthquakes: How to Defend Yourself Against Earthquake Disasters (Tokyo: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, March 2013), 3. 2 Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion, Understanding Earthquakes (Tokyo: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, March 2014), 6. 1
Outlets described the training drills Japanese young and old underwent, the earthquake preparedness kits that individual families kept, as well as the calm manner in which the
Japanese faced the quake. Technologies lauded included sensors to shut off trains so they wouldn't derail, seismic isolation bases installed in skyscrapers which would absorb shocks or allow tall buildings to naturally sway, or early response systems and tsunami walls. If ever there was a nation built to absorb the shock of an earthquake, it was Japan, the media decided. As 'unprecedented' as a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami were, the situation could have been a lot worse, or so the headlines opined. 3 Elsewhere it had been worse, they agreed. In comparison to the Haiti earthquake the year before, while some of the media noted the difficulty in comparing the Japanese and Haitian events, resources, and responses, that didn't stop others. A Forbes editorial summarized many such opinions:
"Japan inspires the world. Haiti offers only despair."4 Writing on Haiti focused more on the human costs and poverty, while that about Japan praised building codes or technologies, with only one exception, the failed Fukushima nuclear plant. However, the situation of bracing Japan from earthquakes is much more uneven and complicated than
3 See, just as a few samples, articles like: Justin McCurry and Ian Sample, "Japan's Earthquake Preparation Has Spared It from a Far Worse Fate,". The Guardian March 11 2011, 4/29/2016
The Dangers of Earthquakes and Japanese Preparedness
Major earthquakes, so long as they don’t also generate tsunami, don’t necessarily kill large numbers of people by themselves--it's the destruction of human environments, technologies, and lives together that become 'natural disasters.' Thus, as earthquake experts Susan Hough and Roger Bilham point out, human structures can and do have the capacity to take human lives and indeed are the biggest danger during and after an earthquake. 5 Buildings are a uniquely human predicament within built environments.
Earthquakes remind us that while housing and other structures serve the functions of providing shelter from the elements or act as places to meet with others, they can also sometimes be a source of great risk to humanity. Houses and buildings are often thought of as simply designed to stand up and primarily to resist the downward pull of gravity.
Earthquakes violently throw structures side-to-side and up-and-down at different rates of acceleration, testing the ability (or revealing the inability) of buildings to resist sudden unintended movement. Not all structures, nor all built environments are equally prepared.
The heavier the material or taller the structure, the greater the potential damage falling building components can cause to human bodies and other structures. Thus to become
'disasters' earthquakes require humans and human structures to be in their way.
5 Susan Elizabeth Hough and Roger G. Bilham, After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 277-79. Land/mudslides and falling trees or rocks, besides tsunami, can of course kill people, though falling buildings or fires are almost always more deadly. 3
Secondary factors can further fuel the damage of earthquakes, while hampering rescue and response efforts, and even later rebuilding. It is against these earthquake- related threats that the Japanese have long sought methods to mitigate the results of the earth's movements. Fires are often sparked as buildings or infrastructure are devastated by seismic events. Almost all major inland earthquakes, from Japan's 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, to events in San Francisco or Italy in the twentieth century, result in conflagrations that can produce large numbers of casualties. The three largest conflagrations just around Tokyo alone have claimed as many as 100,000 lives each in
1657, 1923, and 1945. Fire, sparked by earthquakes or not, has been a constant fear for historically flammable Japanese cities. Though not a focus here, seismic events in the open seas can generate tsunami, or rapidly moving meters-high waves that wash inland in a deadly fashion. The 2004 Sumatra earthquake and that claimed over 200,000 lives and affected more than a dozen countries, or the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster are but two recent examples of devastation wrought by tsunami. Finally, earthquakes can liquefy seemingly solid ground, transforming it into a quicksand-like substance. When this occurs, buildings that are being shaken can sink into the ground, lean, or even topple entirely. This phenomenon of "liquefaction" has regularly occurred in Japan, tipping over multi-story apartment buildings, unearthing buried pipelines, or sinking port structures. Its effects are made worse in the case of artificial foundations made up of filled-in reclaimed land, which the Japanese have made liberal use of in expanding the limits of urban environs.
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Though some areas employed basic earthquake countermeasures in premodern times, institutionalized frameworks did not come into being until after Japan's deadliest disaster in 1923. As far back as the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), cities like Edo/Tokyo have attempted to limit building height to two stories to reduce chance of collapse.
Housing construction reduced flammability through the use of tile roofs, while city design attempted to contain the spread of fire through firebreaks. Following the 1923
Great Kanto Earthquake, Japan was among the world’s first modern nations to implement anti-seismic frameworks, such as a building code that included provisions for lateral structural integrity during earthquake events and thereafter attempted to design cities to account for the possibility of earthquakes, subsequent conflagrations, and ease of rescue and response operations. Today, Japan is among the world leaders in the stringency of its design codes, its anti-earthquake engineering practices and technology, and its density of early warning systems and seismic monitoring stations. These institutionalized practices have had a small, but positive, amount of success in protecting lives and property.
The history of Japanese building codes and urban planning history, however, reveals that such countermeasures often only responded reiteratively to deficiencies revealed by major earthquakes and both have evolved to account for some of the unpredictability of seismic events. These measures have often been unevenly and only retroactively implemented in Japan. Building codes are something like an inoculation-- they are a standardized set of protections that nonetheless require the buy-in of citizens, builders, and officials in order to achieve a greater collective resiliency against disaster.
Cities, however, are far from a homogenized set of structures, mixing the old and new,
5 the weak and sturdy, while tying these up with infrastructure and human populations making millions of diverging decisions per day. Thus, while major earthquakes have in turn driven major changes in codes or practices, in the absence of earthquakes, building practices sometimes became lax. Additionally, the utilization of new types of technologies or methods have regularly preempted the creation of new laws to regulate them. What is more, even in periods of rebuilding, lessons about seismic mitigation previously learned have been ignored in the face of housing shortages, population pressures, and weak enforcement of existing codes and planning practices.
The Limitations of the Natural Environment and Its Effects on Built Japan
As historians of the environment remind us, nature is an actor that operates outside of human considerations of time and space. The natural environment upon which and within which we live is an actor that is all-too-easily forgotten in our day-to-day experience--earthquakes are a powerful reminder of the agency of nature. As Giacomo
Parrinello writes in his book on Italian earthquakes, “Sometimes nonhuman forces shape cities as much as humans do, and we should regard them as important drivers in the making of urban environments. Earthquakes are one of those forces.” 6 Cities are therefore hardly immune to the influence of nature, even those of a more mundane variety. Instead, cities grow in large part due to the natural geography near or upon which they are constructed.
Japanese cities, Tokyo included, have shifted dramatically in architectural trends in direct response to risks posed by natural phenomenon, including earthquakes, fires,
6 Giacomo Parrinello, Fault Lines: Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 6. 6 tsunami, or inland flooding. Public buildings shifted from wood, to brick, to steel, to heavy concrete and beyond, trending from less rigid to overly stiff, and then back again, all while expanding in terms of overall volume and building height. Personal housing has operated in a realm in between. Private housing generally tends toward wooden structures reflective of the economic circumstances under which they were built. Fire is a continual age-old enemy. Modern cities developed not only in accordance to international trends in style and material, as well as domestic population growth, but also in response to state-of- the-art science and research at the time. Earthquakes just as often demonstrated vulnerabilities in then-contemporary ways of thinking, challenging architects, engineers, and city planners to come up with new solutions that combined safely, functionality, contemporary aesthetics, and practical use. As is the character of most cities, not all of these elements meshed together, were actually considered to begin with, or could even be practically engineered.
Cities themselves are ever-evolving organisms as varied and complex as the humans who built them over time. Some parts are intentionally shaped by circumstances, communities, and individuals, though just as often portions are unplanned, constructed without foresight, or consistently rebuilt or repurposed. Edo/Tokyo was destroyed in part or whole by earthquakes and (more often) by fires countless dozens of times in the
Tokugawa period alone. Fire, earthquakes, flooding, and eventually, war, did their work in Tokyo and other cities in the modern period as well. Each time these parts were rebuilt into a different version of themselves, incorporating structures and layouts old and new, sometimes with the guiding hand of central or local governments, other times without.
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The Japanese islands support, past and present, one of the world’s most densely packed societies, and the land of the archipelago has been heavily manipulated to support urban living spaces and rural production. In his book about the history of forestry in
Japan, Conrad Totman notes that “in terms of density per unit of arable it is dramatically more populous that any major society on earth.” 7 Less than 15 percent of Japan’s land is arable. That land is divided between some of the world’s largest cities in addition to agricultural spaces heavily engineered to accommodate the very population they must support.
Thus, the Japanese have been manipulating their landscape to construct fields and waterways for agriculture, in addition to cities and harbors for many hundreds of years.
Much knowledge of former natural boundaries or geographical features has been lost to the ages. The Japanese constructed artificial islands as early as 1175 (Kyogashima) to aid with medieval trade with China, or Dejima in the 1630s that housed Dutch traders after
Edo Japan otherwise closed its doors to most foreign commerce. The former was eventually absorbed into other reclaimed land projects as the city and port of Kobe. Edo, the city that would become Tokyo—once and again the world’s single most populated metropolitan area—was built from a fishing village and over former swampland. An inlet that led up to the Imperial Palace was filled in, upon which many feudal lords constructed their houses. 8 After the Meiji restoration, such projects would only accelerate, with the creation of a significant amount of artificial port land or islands in Tokyo, Yokohama, or
7 Conrad D. Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 172. 8 K. Horikawa, "History of Coastal Engineering in Japan," Advances in Coastal and Ocean Engineering 6 (2000): 1-56. 8
Kobe, while cities such as Niigata filled in natural rivers and artificial waterways to give rise to modern infrastructure. In the case of liquefaction, noted above, reclaimed land is a highly relevant factor in how seismic events play out.
In urban contexts, reclaimed land was and is a technical solution to the spatial limitations faced by Japan’s largest and most important cities. That same technical solution, however, has the potential for disastrous consequences. Such manipulation is part of what Philip Brown calls "Japan's controlling urge,” or a long-term focus on engineering and technical solutions. 9 Beyond creating more usable land, this also
includes the lining and diking of most of Japan's major rivers and waterways with
concrete to prevent flooding, as well as the smoothing of mountains and hillsides to
impair potential land/mudslides.
Risk and Prediction of Earthquakes
Due to the unstable nature of the Japanese archipelago, one response has been the
Sisyphean efforts of scientists to eliminate disaster entirely by attempting to precisely
determine when and where seismic events might strike. Competing with engineering,
since the beginning of Japan’s modernization transition in the Meiji era, has been a focus
earthquake prediction, a predilection that has had both positive and negative
consequences in Japan’s encounters with earthquakes. As both Gregory Smits (and Greg
Clancey) demonstrate in their examination of Tokugawa and Meiji era seismology, “it is
possible to argue that modern seismology was as much an Anglo-Japanese science as
9 Philip C. Brown, "Constructing Nature," in Japan at Nature's Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power , ed. Ian Jared Miller, Julia Adeney Thomas and Brett L. Walker (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 98. 9 anything else.” Japanese scientists were able to draw upon their land’s “own seismicity and the vast historical data from the Tokugawa period,” to push the frontiers of what many thought would eventually bear fruit in the form of being able to precisely predict earthquakes and evacuate areas ahead of time. 10 This idea still holds sway today.
In setting up seismic monitoring stations throughout Japan while observing natural phenomenon in the hopes of discerning patterns of predictability, Japanese seismology has often found itself assembling data in vain and at the expense of other alternatives. Though such seismological data has resulted in earthquake probability maps and influenced architectural stress calculations (in turn refining building codes), actual prediction has and will likely ever prove elusive. The extent to which these maps are considered when and where construction occurs and humans gather is unclear, however they have influenced such things as insurance. Furthermore, the predicted probability of earthquakes and when/where they actually occur have not often matched up. As Smits argues, money that could have gone to mitigation has often been siphoned off to prediction to the tune of millions of yen per year for decades. By contrast, only at the turn of the millennium did Japan begin to sponsor seismic retrofitting programs.
Thus, despite seismology’s attempts to make earthquakes predictable on a human level, seismic events operate outside of a human sense of time and space, making our reaction to such events even more muddled. Unlike disasters caused by hurricanes/typhoons, tornados, or forest fires, earthquakes do not have seasons in which they re-occur with predictably higher probability. Instead, in terms of global disaster
10 Gregory Smits, When the Earth Roars : Lessons from the History of Earthquakes in Japan (Lanham: Rowman& Littlefield, 2014), 174. 10 studies and responses, as historian Christof Mauch points out, until the 1980s, disasters were viewed as extreme deviations from the norm. 11 Yet, on a geological scale,
earthquakes are a relatively normal, frequent phenomenon. Here the historian has an
advantage in being able to make long term linkages to the past, and environmental
history’s concept of the longue durée even more so. Within such a perspective,
earthquakes in Japan and elsewhere are not a deviation from the norm, but an important
part of Japan’s history with continuing relevance to the future.
Rebuilding and the Gaps Between Events
The process of rebuilding in the event of disasters and the drive to return to a state
of 'normality' is a continuing issue with earthquakes. Similar to Mauch, Kenneth Hewitt
has argued that “natural calamity is essentially the breakdown of the productive functions
of society…essentially an infringement upon the centralized ordering of space.” The
reaction to disaster has historically been an impulsion to re-create things as they were, or
as Hewitt explains the dominant view, being that “The restorations of productivity and
reimposing of ‘normal’ relations become the main prescriptions of crisis management,
relief and reconstruction.” 12 Yet, the rebuilding between events, especially when imbued with a desire to quickly return living or working conditions back to the ‘norm,’ can often have disastrous unforeseen consequences years down the road.
Rebuilding hastily, cheaply, and without concern for the future can make future disasters worse, and yet, in Japan as in many other places, this is precisely what happens.
11 Christof Mauch, "Introduction," in Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies Toward a Global Environmental History , ed. Christof Mauch, Christian Pfister (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 10-11. 12 Kenneth Hewitt, "The Idea of Calamity in a Technocratic Age," in Interpretations of Calamity from the Viewpoint of Human Ecology , ed. Kenneth Hewitt (Boston: Allen &Unwin, 1983), 29. 11
The rebuilding process is a complex arena of social and material relief, the restoration of lifestyles, economic challenges and limitations, politics, and memory. Even if there is a desire for careful, measured reconstruction and planning, the means to do so are not always practical or economically feasible in the face of disaster victims' immediate plight. This is evident after 1923 and the end of World War Two. Additionally, over time post-disaster cities also reflect trends discussed in recent studies of agnatology, or the study of the unmaking of knowledge, wherein "The mechanisms involved in producing or maintaining ignorance can change over time, and once things are made unknown--by suppression or by apathy--they can often remain unknown without further effort." 13 This includes, as noted above, building in areas where land was reclaimed in the past or re- using techniques or materials that had failed in the past. Such a loss of knowledge is again, something best viewed over time. These and other circumstances deserve closer examination than they have received so far.
Thus, unlike works like those of Gregory Clancy, Charles Schencking, or Gregory
Smits, rather than focusing on one earthquake event, I instead examine a longer period from late Taisho (1912-26) to 1995 and beyond. Though individual disasters and their immediate recovery assuredly shaped Japan, the gaps in between events are just as important. History need not always be primarily event driven, but must look at erstwhile silences between events just as much as the connection of events. Looking at Japan's multiple encounters with earthquakes over time demonstrates how nature has repeatedly
13 Robert Proctor, "Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (And Its Study)," in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance , ed. Robert Proctor and Londa L. Schiebinger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 2008), 8. 12 affected city development and lives, while demonstrating how technology and practices once thought to be solutions instead became dangers. Some mistakes are repeated, others at least partially are corrected; knowledge is frequently lost and ignorance manufactured.
Finally, not all earthquakes have been examined equally, as is the case of Niigata in 1964 or the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which have been relatively ignored by historians in terms of their long-term links to Japan's seismic past, as well as the postwar growth and reconstruction of Japan.
Global Disaster and Japan
Though nature might appear as being heavily regulated and controlled within built human environments today, earthquakes reveal the very real power that a mere few seconds of a seismic event can have over cities. While humans can heavily influence the natural environment and might drive certain animals to extinction or increase global temperature through our actions, we sometimes forget the influence that nature (in the form of geological forces) has over even our urban environs. Cities have grown according to not only human need, but within the limitations of local geography. Technology provides the ability to level mountains, fill in ports, or create tall structures, though these responses are shaped by the lived-in geography of the natural world just as much as human will. Such engineering has limits.
When earthquakes strike, cities themselves can be quickly transformed into dangerous embattled landscapes that inhibit response and continue to cause casualties well after the initial shock. We give little thought to the interconnected nature of our modern transportation and communication infrastructure, while daily necessities such as
13 water, electricity, or gas are delivered to our homes and places of work through networks that we pay little attention to. That is, at least until they are destroyed and we are suddenly left without them. In the collision between natural forces and shaped urban environments, earthquakes can shed light on such things as existing social problems
(ethnic tensions, poverty, Japan's aging society), additional environmentally-related problems, government preparedness and response, as well as the gaps between law, practice, and reality that have developed over time.
Finally, globally speaking, Japan is not alone in experiencing urban disaster. Only recently (as of 2007) has the world’s population become an urban majority. That being said, however, the percentage of urban dwellers is expected to swell along with the world’s surging population to as much as two-thirds by 2050. 14 The last two decades have witnessed not only several major earthquakes in Japan, but devastating earthquake and tsunami disasters in India, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Haiti, and Nepal. The collective tolls of such events easily run into the several hundreds of thousands.
Increasing urbanization, especially when unplanned and unregulated, concentrates an increasing number of people in increasingly risk-laden built environments.
Japan has been hailed as a global leader in disaster mitigation. Yet, past disasters have not been without their human and material costs. As Ian Douglas writes in Cities:
An Environmental History , "As a global society, we cannot isolate the urban environment from our social, cultural and economic activities...Major disasters...may affect cities, but their impact will in part depend on how we have built the cities and how we manage them
14 United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth . 2007, 1/8/2016
15 Ian Douglas, Cities: An Environmental History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 309. 15
Chapter 1: Japan's Premodern Legacy, Early Earthquake Mitigation and Prediction
Efforts, and the Disaster of 1923
Premodern 16 Japanese cities, structures, and technological paths were influenced
by the nature of the Japanese peninsula and the resources available there. Unlike
European countries, there is little tradition of masonry in premodern Japan to build
anything other than foundations, walls, or pathways. This is in no small part due to the
resources available to the Japanese--stone quarries, the like found in Europe or the
Americas, did not exist in Japan, while the resources to make mortar or concrete were
scarce. Wood was, and to this day remains, the primary material used and desired in
housing construction. 17 Wood by its nature is vulnerable to decay, fire, and earthquakes.
Japanese responses to the land’s natural endowments helped create a cultural tradition regarding the ephemeral nature of housing and perhaps even cities. Records show large swaths of cities and structures being demolished by fire, earthquakes, or both, time and again, while Japan's eventual capital in Tokyo was laid low entirely on more than one occasion by earthquake, fire, and war.
Though the Japanese had some limited frameworks and practices to limit the damage of earthquakes of fire, these would only begin to coalesce after Japan's single
16 Here, in terms of architecture and government, 'premodern' is broadly used to refer to everything before 1868. 17 Building Center of Japan, A Quick Look at Housing in Japan (Tokyo: Building Center of Japan, 2014), 66. According to a Building Center of Japan poll, "approximately 80% of the respondents said they would choose wooden housing when building or purchasing their own homes," calling this a "deep-rooted demand for wooden housing." 16 most deadly earthquake disaster destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923. A 7.9M earthquake shook the capital and the ensuing days of fires leveled both cities, resulting in the single largest loss of life to an earthquake in Japan's history. This revealed the incredible power nature held over Japan, despite that by the Taisho era (1912-26), Japan was the primary military power in East Asia, the holder of a growing empire, and the first
Asian nation to gain recognition of the Western powers. 1920s Japan was experimenting with different building styles, a world leader in the fledgling science of seismology, and just beginning to embrace the idea of national architectural standards and city planning practices. This mish-mash of directions and approaches would do little to mitigate nature, however, and the lack of established frameworks only heightened both the human and material costs and complicated responses of the population and government to the disaster.
The post-earthquake rebuilding process was fraught with division, pitting the desires of bureaucrats like Goto Shinpei, who wanted to shape the capital into a resilient city, versus opponents who warned against the costly fiscal and practical realities of implementing such plans. Meanwhile, private citizens went ahead and started to rebuild their lives and neighborhoods from the ashes. Within this contestation, Japan's first nation-wide building codes and city-planning frameworks emerged from the confusion of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, and marking a historical turning-point in earthquake mitigation to a greater focus on building to last.
Encounters and Attitudes Toward Earthquakes/Fire, Architecture, and Science before the
Great Earthquake
17
Kamo no Chomei's Hojiki contains one of the earliest widely known personal
accounts of an earthquake and outlines issues of disaster and memory that continue until
the present day. Writing of an unnamed earthquake that struck Kyoto in the 1180s,
Chomei relates how "Dust billowed like smoke, the shaking earth and collapsing houses
rumbled like thunder. If people stayed indoors, they were crushed at once." He continues,
"It was then that I came to recognize an earthquake as the most terrible of all things."
This most terrible of things was not the first, and hardly the last. Yet, as he shortly notes,
the memory of the disaster and the feelings associated with it just as quickly vanished. In
getting along with their lives and rebuilding their housing, soon "nobody even mentioned
the subject after the days and months had accumulated and the years had slipped
by...such is the ephemerality of man and his dwellings." 18 This ephemeral nature of
housing and other structures is clearly evident in the Japan of all eras. Such views were
dictated in part by the resources available.
Premodern building practices required a tremendous amount of wood, affecting
the sustainability of Japan's forests. Conrad Totman's The Green Archipelago argues that
by rights, the Japanese peninsula should have been a bare, impoverished land by the
modern era as forests were cleared in large "predations" for wooden monuments, houses,
or for war materials. Yet, somehow despite several cycles of major deforestation, the
Japanese eventually implemented sustainable forestry frameworks to keep the use of
wood in check without overly devastating forests around local population centers. By
contrast, stone was seldom utilized for anything other than castle foundations (which by
18 Kamo no Chomei, "Hojoki / An Account of My Hermitage," in Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology , ed. Helen Craig McCullough (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1990), 386. 18 themselves were a sound anti-earthquake technology), walkways, or barriers to ward off the spread of fire. Wood instead dictated day-to-day construction and carried with it vulnerabilities exposed in the event of an earthquake.
The fear of earthquakes was likely only exceeded by the fear of fire sweeping through cities. Writing just after the end of the Tokugawa era (1600-1868), Edward
Morse noted that Japanese cities "...stand in constant fear of conflagrations. Almost every month they are reminded of the instability of the ground they rest upon by slight tremors and shocks, which may be precursors of destructive earthquakes, usually accompanied by conflagrations infinitely more disastrous." 19 Though fires were certainly not limited to the political capital of Edo, which by the seventeenth century topped one million souls to rank among the largest cities in the world, the city was subject to hundreds of major fires throughout the Tokugawa period. 20 Fires in densely packed Edo, even when not sparked
by an earthquake could be particularly deadly. The Meireki fire of 1657, for instance,
killed over 100,000 alone in Edo and leveled much of the city, fueled by the city’s
ubiquitous wooden structures.
The fear of fires dictated countermeasures, some of which in turn introduced new earthquake-related issues. One included a dedicated corpus of firefighters who would tear down buildings to create firebreaks during conflagrations. Common housing was built constructed not only with the notion of being cheaply replicable, but also easily demolished in the case of a large fire. Other solutions prompted injunctions to limit the
19 Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings , 317-18. 20 Matsuunosuke Nishiyama, Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868 , translated by Gerald Groemer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 29. 19 flammability of frequently-utilized thatched roofs, which were instead replaced with heavy tiled roofing. This material made for top-heavy wooden houses supported by frames that were designed to be torn down in emergencies. This means that common housing collapsed all that much more easily under seismic forces. Thus, even in premodern times, a technical solution that worked to lessen one threat could in turn create another.
There were additional indications that natural disasters shaped premodern attitudes toward the longevity (or perceived lack thereof) of urban housing. For example, a status symbol of the well-to-do was that one had to have a separate fire-resistant plastered warehouse full of replacement materials to rebuild one’s home when fire invariably struck. Such storehouses set together also functioned as firebreaks for the rest of the city. Additionally, valuables were often stored near entrance-ways to more easily be gathered up, so residents could quickly flee before oncoming conflagrations. 21 Indeed,
one historian commented that, “The son of Edo could count with certainty on losing his
property and merchandise to frequent conflagrations.” 22
Because of multiple encounters with disaster, even during the Tokugawa era, the
Japanese had some basic ideas on how build with earthquakes in mind. Overall, prior to
Japan's modernization attempts during the Meiji period (1868-1912), earthquakes and the tsunami they generated claimed as many as 100,000 lives. As a response, outside of sumptuary laws prohibiting the construction of multi-story buildings for status reasons,
21 Susan B Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 44-45. 22 Nishiyama, Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868 , 37. 20 structures were generally not supposed to exceed two stories. People understood that they could easily be shaken down by earthquakes. Some public buildings and gates in the late
Tokugawa period even had ‘earthquake doors,’ or smaller openings within larger doors through which citizens could flee if the larger doors became jammed. 23
After Japan was forced to re-engage with the West in Meiji period, the Japanese began to experiment with and implement new forms of Western architecture, utilizing materials other than wood. This included stone and brick architecture. The traditional construction knowledge of Japan's daiku (both builders and architects) revolved around wooden carpentry, not masonry. Modernizing architecture required major investments in hiring foreign teachers to train Japanese students to begin to design and oversee the construction of non-native designs. Meiji leaders additionally sought to build examples of model factories of brick and iron, that which defined the 'civilization' of the West and promoted 'progress.' This also created a need to invest in new parts and materials and thus the beginnings of creating infrastructure and researching methods to produce brick buildings or industrial metals within the scope of Japan's resources. 24
Brick and iron allowed for the construction of larger and sturdier public buildings, which would project the image of a modern, enduring state while helping solve the age- old problem of fire. One new student of masonry commented of old Edo that “They presumed a fire once in three years in the rich streets and once in five years in the poor.
23 Edward Sylvester Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (Rutland, Vt: C.E. Tuttle Co., 1972), 251; 259. 24 Gregory Clancy, Earthquake Nation : The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 11-38. See also David G.Wittner, Technology and the Culture of Progress in Meiji Japan (London: Routledge 2008), 43-98 21
So why build expensive buildings?” 25 Thus, when part of Tokyo (formerly Edo) was
destroyed in fire in 1872, the district of Ginza was set aside as a model area to be
expensively reconstructed with modern fireproof brick buildings and wider roads,
supposedly a vision of the Japan that could be. Expensive public buildings were
increasingly invested in by the Meiji government who hoped to promote new ideas and
ideals of technology. Not only would Japan begin to show itself equal to the West, but
brick and iron were seen as a dividing line from the 'backwards' Tokugawa era and its
association with flammable wood.
The Meiji government's commitment to brick and iron was in contrast with
majority of the populace who still lived or worked within wooden structures, and an
earthquake that occurred in 1891 would put old carpentry and new masonry practices
under the spotlight. As Gregory Clancy describes in his book, Earthquake Nation , the
Nobi Earthquake of 1891 would bring out supporters for both wood and brick, spark
Japanese nationalism, and become an important case study for the young modern science
of seismology in Japan. On one hand “large iron bridges and the walls of brick factories
and post offices came crashing down, while Japanese temples, pagodas, and architectural
monuments…escaped unharmed.” Yet, on the other, thousands of wooden houses
constructed by traditional methods, and to that point lauded for their supposed flexibility
during earthquake events, collapsed upon their tenants. Most of Nobi's earthquake
victims were crushed or immolated by their own wooden houses. 26 This earthquake called into question the supposed superiority of imported Western technologies and
25 Clancy, Earthquake Nation : The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 ), 59. 26 Clancy, Earthquake Nation : The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 , 2, 128. 22 techniques, especially the use of brick in a country so frequently wrought by seismic events. It also divided the new model brick public buildings from common wooden private housing, for both represented something different, while both had seismic weaknesses. The Ginza district project mentioned above did not burn after the earthquake, but its brick structures did crack in hundreds of places. This focus on new architecture was paired with the beginnings of an interest in new sciences.
Within the same era, seismology, which later became known as a “peculiarly
Japanese science,” took its first steps to make contributions in the understanding of earthquakes and suitable building practices. With the assistance of Englishman John
Milne (partial inventor of the horizontal seismograph), a seismological society was founded in Japan in 1880. Later, Tokyo Imperial University created the world’s first chaired position of seismology in 1886. 27 First, from its onset, seismologists attempted
not only to discover what actually caused earthquakes but to discover enough about the
earth’s movements to provide short and long-term predictive services. Secondly,
seismology was poised to provide some aid in the area of construction in the form of
providing formulae that could set standards for seismically resistant structures.
Thus, in light of architectural experimentation and seismological discoveries there
arose a generation of architects who were increasingly conscious about the weaknesses of
particular building materials and sought to solve problems presented by the Nobi
Earthquake. This included the beginning of mathematical investigations into the
relationship between the magnitude and intensity of earthquakes and failure rates of
27 Akitsune Imamura, "The Great Earthquake of S. E. Japan on Sept. 1, 1923, with Two Appendices," in Scientific Japan, Past and Present (Tokyo: Gakujutsu Kenkyu Kaigi, 1926), ii. 23 different structures under the banner of the newly formed Imperial Earthquake
Investigation Committee (1892-1925). The committee’s members included both seismologists and engineers/architects who were “eagerly active in studying the effects of shocks, both natural and artificial, upon different structural elements of various kinds of buildings.” 28 Some architects experimented with various methods of framing or bracing
within wooden houses. The daiku continued to design and build wooden houses that
favored flexibility and that the majority of the populace both found more to their liking
and could actually afford. However, the Taisho period saw the development of structures
on the opposite side of the spectrum. Ferro concrete, wherein concrete is poured around
and reinforced by an internal web of iron bars, increasingly became popular for business
offices and large projects like apartment-type housing. Other buildings also came to be
framed externally with steel girders to increase their sturdiness. 29
Thus with this history in mind, from the Tokugawa period until near the end of the Taisho era, it’s clear that the formative fundamentals of earthquake mitigation existed in a number of disparate forms. However, basic elements of codification, construction practices, city planning, and prediction would not begin to be put together and defined at the national level until Japan experienced its single most deadly earthquake in 1923, which revealed any number of vulnerabilities in Japan’s most advanced city. The nature of the earthquake damage and the fire that followed would parallel urban threats that had been present throughout Japanese history, threats influenced by the environment of
28 Torahiko Terada and Takeo Matsuzawa, "A Historical Sketch of the Development of Seismology in Japan," in Scientific Japan, Past and Present (Tokyo: Gakujutsu Kenkyu Kaigi, 1926), 306. 29 Clancy, Earthquake Nation : The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 , 212-33. 24
Japan's archipelago. On the part of officials and scientists, the period after the great earthquake would be a space for mostly unrealized optimism about lessons learned and how they could be applied to the future benefit of Japan.
The Planning That Almost Was and the Nature of the Great Kanto Earthquake
1919 saw Japan’s initial attempt at creating urban planning and building laws to be implemented in six major cities. In 1917-18 Goto Shinpei, who had a long resume as the head of a railway company, the Colonization Bureau, several ministerial posts, and later became mayor of Tokyo City, set up the City Planning Section within the Home
Ministry. The Ministry also established a City Planning Research Committee whose members included academics, engineers, architects, and elected officials. Planning had to that point been left to individual cities and there was no national framework under which the central government could easily intervene. In 1919, however, members produced the
Urban Buildings Law. 30 This included building regulations for “design loads, frame stress, and allowable material stress,” or in more practical terms, the strength, durability, and quality of construction materials and bracing. The height of buildings was also limited to about 100 feet. 31 Additionally, the organization of city planning, such as zoning
and land readjustment systems, and bureaucracy to designate public buildings or control
growth on the urban fringe was laid out under the City Planning Law of the same year.
From 1919-1923, planners in Yokohama, as in Tokyo, were in the midst of
creating long term plans for the city, its growing port and infrastructure, as well as in
30 Andre´ Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan : Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2002), 108-24. 31 Hiroshi Kuramoto, "Seismic Design Codes for Buildings in Japan," Journal of Disaster Research 1, no. 3 (2006): 341. 25 dividing city areas by use. A 1919 fire destroyed 3,000 houses and enough of the city that it prompted plans to reconstruct and reorganize the city and its port, in part utilizing the overall Urban Planning Law of the same year. Public housing was also to be created for victims of the fire. Under a newly formed Municipal District Alteration Bureau, the city attempted to utilize the 1919 zoning laws to separate out trade quarters, factory areas, and private homes from one another in order to improve safety as well as lifestyle quality. 32
Yokohama and other major cities were to be divided up into three types of zones:
residential, commercial, and industrial areas. Residential areas were to be free from
factories, along with their noise, smells, and presence as a fire hazard. In addition public
gathering spots, crematoria or incinerators, warehouses, and slaughterhouses were
prohibited. Commercial zones could not house large (over 50 employees) factories and
could play host to taller structures, while there were no restrictions in industrial zones. 33
It was in the midst of implementing these plans for Tokyo, Yokohama, and four
other major cities that the earthquake struck. The full realization of the 1919 codes would
have to wait until they were quickly re-appropriated to deal with the aftermath of the
disaster. Instead of needing to envision how to re-plan existing cities, the earthquake
wiped the slate clean for the area surrounding the capital as it destroyed cities and lives.
Around noon on September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed much
of Tokyo and most of Yokohama, plus parts of outlying areas. By the time that the last
flames subsided two days later and the last victims had died of their wounds, the number
32 Yokohama Toshi Hatten Kinenkan, Me De Miru Toshi Yokohama No Ayumi / The Urban History of Yokohama (2003), 11-13. 33 Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan : Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century, 116. 26 of deceased stood as many as 140,000. The total number of buildings destroyed or heavily damaged by the earthquake itself only represented around 2.5% of the overall buildings lost. However, the ensuing great conflagrations took care of the rest, while fires also claimed the majority of lives. 34 As many as 35,000 Japanese crowded the open space
near the Honjo clothing factory Tokyo in an attempt to flee the fire, though when the
wind shifted and produced tornadoes of fire, the flames surrounded the tightly packed
mob, the majority of which were unable to escape, and either burned or suffocated. The
earthquake destroyed many bridges around Tokyo, closing escape routes, while the fire
forced some evacuees into superheated water, drowning or boiling them. Water lines
throughout the city were also broken, making firefighting all that much more difficult.
Estimates from that time put the cost at 5.5 billion yen in 1926 terms. 35
As with Tokyo, Yokohama lay devastated after the earthquake. Yokohama's new port crumbled and sank, while housing and commercial facilities still in the midst of reorganization, were engulfed by the ensuing flames. Some 33,000 died in Yokohama alone, while the city lost 95% of the housing within its limits. The planning bureau chief died during the course of the event, while flames consumed city hall and all of the city's planning documents. 36 Thus, the earthquake not only devastated lives and physical
structures, but also erased knowledge useful in rebuilding Yokohama.
34 Tokyo (Japan), The Reconstruction of Tokyo (Tokyo: Kawaguchi Printing Works, 1933), 18. 35 Imamura, "The Great Earthquake of S. E. Japan on Sept. 1, 1923, with Two Appendices," 170. This comes out to around $50 billion dollars in 2014 currency, making it perhaps the third most expensive Japanese earthquake after the 1995 Kobe and 2011 ones. 36 Yokohama Toshi Hatten Kinenkan, Me De Miru Toshi Yokohama No Ayumi / The Urban History of Yokohama , 14. 27
That the earthquake happened during “cooking hour of noon also accounted for the spread of the conflagration, the charcoal fires being overturned, or things turned over them, almost everywhere.” The disaster also induced the “breaking down of electric wires as well as the blowing up of gas mains.” This provided the flames of the fire, while the cheap, ubiquitous Japanese wooden housing fueled the start and spread of the following conflagrations.37 Even though houses with tiling or certain types of walls might have better resisted fire, the preceding earthquake shook tiles from their roofs and cracked plaster walls, allowing sparks to enter into more flammable areas and the flames to continue to spread. A volume compiled by the Home Ministry's Office of Social Affairs in 1926 flatly stated in its introduction that “The horrible disaster in Tokyo and
Yokohama may be...attributed to the style of construction of houses and the conflagrations that accompanied the seismic convulsions.” 38
The danger of fires in modernizing Tokyo was not without some aspect of warning, either. Due to the precedents of conflagrations above in the Tokugawa period, it’s not a surprise that the mayor of Tokyo at the time, Nagata Hidejiro, noted that one of his first concerns moments after recovering from the quake’s shock was that of “fires— from time immemorial the necessary accompaniment to an earthquake.” 39 Additionally,
one particular seismologist, Imamura Akitsune, who quickly became the man of the hour
after the quake, predicted some aspects of the situation in 1923. He warned that Tokyo
might be visited by a large earthquake in the future and that if “the system and equipment
37 Iemasu Tokugawa, "The Earthquake and Work on Reconstruction in Japan," Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 72, no. 3718 (Feb. 22 1924): 226. 38 Morihiko Fujisawa, The Great Earthquake of 1923 in Japan (Tokyo: Naimusho Shakaikyoku, 1926), 4. 39 Tokyo (Japan), The Reconstruction of Tokyo , 92. 28 of fire protection remain unimproved, by a general conflagration…a loss of lives to the extent of 100,000” might occur. 40 This warning, however, came 18 years before the Great
Kanto Earthquake. What Imamura did was not accurately predict the earthquake in any useful terms (his prediction window was 50 years), but attempt to call attention to the historically demonstrated issue of fire within Edo/Tokyo. Despite this call to arms, the story of fire played out once again.
The fire did its work so well, burning and toppling most of what was left of old
Edo, because of the existing cramped housing districts, which were previously destroyed and rebuilt any number of times with only haphazard planning. Streets did not follow any set path and most were generally narrow, allowing flames to jump from one block of houses to another. Houses were also clustered closely together, providing easy tinder. In the 1891 disaster, fires were less of an issue, whereas in 1923 they were responsible for the overwhelming number of deaths. Additionally, by the Taisho period, the urban sprawl of Japan’s two largest cities had spilled out onto both long-forgotten, as well as newly reclaimed alluvial land. Compared to solid ground, such foundations are particularly unsteady and amplify seismic forces, causing additional devastation for wooden houses.
Newer types of architecture did not necessarily fare any better. Two contemporary seismologists note that “Actually, a number of brick buildings…have beautifully stood the most severe test in the form of the recent Kanto Earthquake, while, a remarkable contrast, some of the reinforced concrete buildings of modern design with no proper
40 Imamura, "The Great Earthquake of S. E. Japan on Sept. 1, 1923, with Two Appendices," 142. 29 precaution against earthquakes have suffered considerable damage.” 41 Even reinforced
concrete or steel-framed structures, if not constructed in a proper manner with the correct
materials, either out of ignorance or cost-saving measures, didn’t guarantee any greater
safety. Pictorial evidence also demonstrates that the flames reached such intensity that the
fire was able to melt metal supports, either externally framed, or exposed by cracks
caused by the earthquake. Thus the mixing of wooden and non-wooden structures didn’t
ultimately produce a situation where one construction method was advantageous over
another.
Beyond structures, while earthquakes also have the very real power to turn not
only urban environs into an embattled, burning landscape, they can also violently draw
out smoldering social tensions. The 1923 disaster exposed a more raw, xenophobic side
of the citizens of Tokyo and Yokohama. The great Kanto Earthquake followed on the
heels of the tumultuous late 1910s, with internal riots in 1918 and protests against
Japanese colonialism in Korea 1919, heightening tensions generally an between Japanese
and Korean immigrants specifically. Thus, when “All means of communication were
obstructed, and wanton rumors widely circulated. The public were alarmed and excited,
adding more to a disaster already of appalling magnitude.” 42 As fires consumed the cities
of Tokyo and Yokohama, rumors broke out that immigrants from then-colonial Korea
were starting fires, looting, or poisoning local wells, taking advantage of the chaos to
ferment revolution. During the days that followed, citizens organized into thousands of
vigilante groups, blocking off streets and questioning anyone passing through.
41 Terada and Matsuzawa, "A Historical Sketch of the Development of Seismology in Japan," 306. 42 Fujisawa, The Great Earthquake of 1923 in Japan , 1-2. 30
The actions of these vigilante groups quickly went far beyond mere questioning and instead became mob violence in which as many as 5,000-6,000 Koreans, some
Chinese, and even a few Japanese were murdered by roving mobs. Anyone who sounded like a foreigner, including Japanese with thick regional accents or students from a destroyed school for the deaf were at risk of being killed. Thousands of Koreans turned themselves into the police seeking protection, though even then, not all who did were saved. The local police, victims themselves, were overwhelmed with trying to simultaneously help survivors while also keeping the peace. 43
The central government had no plans on the books to deal with a natural or social disaster of this magnitude, especially with itself caught in the middle, and had difficultly coordinating relief efforts and restoring order. Though Tokyo mayor Nagata's first thought might have been combating the fire, the earthquake severed the city's waterworks, making firefighting on a large scale impossible. In Yokohama, river levies were damaged and burst, complicating efforts there. With communication and news networks largely down and having little means to control the spread of anti-Korean rumors, the government invoked an early form of the Peace Preservation law in order to declare martial law and restore order, though only reasserted control days after the quake itself. This law would be re-written in 1925 to suppress political dissention as Japan grew increasingly militant and Japan's Home Ministry promoted policies that would lead to later war. Thus, frameworks utilized in part to deal with the Great Kanto Earthquake's aftermath also influenced the Japan of the 1930s-40s.
43 Sonia Ryang, "The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923: Notes on Japan's Modern National Sovereignty," Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 734-35. 31
Rebuilding and Bracing for the Future
Looking back, the disaster in 1923 and its fallout was as bad as it was because of
a lack of planning and regulation, which created vulnerabilities in structures and in
response capabilities. These issues consisted of a lack of anti-seismic planning and
precautions, common use of materials and methods vulnerable to earthquakes, and the
density of the unplanned urban sprawl (as well as poor timing). Such vulnerabilities were
clearly recognized in efforts to rebuild the city, where as the mayor put it, “Only the
lessons furnished by the past experiences and the fearful consequences of disastrous
earthquakes and the fire were to be taken into serious consideration, and the exercise of
special precaution and forethought was needed regarding future development and
prosperity.” 44
The Japanese government attempted to address these vulnerabilities through a re- appropriation of the 1919 codes. Elements of the aforementioned 1919 Urban Building
Law changed as a result of the earthquake, producing one of the world’s first anti-seismic building regulation article in 1923 (still limited to major cities). This required the construction of all new buildings to be able to withstand 10% of its overall weight when moving laterally (i.e., being shaken by an earthquake). In the domain of fires, the existing zoning conventions were made use of to require buildings within certain zones to either be “non-inflammable in materials and fireproof in construction” or in other zones, only the outer sides/walls to be semi-fireproof. 45 This was supported by some 20 million yen
available to help subsidize the process. Internationally, other building codes with
44 Tokyo (Japan), The Reconstruction of Tokyo , 133. 45 Tokyo (Japan), The Reconstruction of Tokyo , 195. 32 consideration for seismic forces existed prior to the Japanese code, such as those in San
Francisco or Italy as a result of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and 1908 Messina
Earthquake, respectively. 46 The Japanese versions were intended to be national and were
based on seismological observations and subsequent state-of-the-art calculations as
experienced during the 1923 earthquake, accounting for what designers then thought
might make for a seismically sound structure.
More broadly, urban planners, scientists, and politicians looked forward to
rebuilding a modern city from the ground up with a blank slate, much the way Sapporo in
Japan’s northern island (Hokkaido) or cities in Japan’s colonies had been constructed. An
imperial rescript notes that though “city has entirely lost its former prosperous contours
but retains, nevertheless, its position as the national capital.” Therefore the rebuilding
“ought not to consist merely in the reparation of the quondam metropolis, but, in ample
provisions for the future development of the city, completely to transform the avenues
and streets.” 47 Many individuals thus saw the reconstruction of Tokyo “as an unparalleled
opportunity,” as Charles Schencking argues in his book on the rebuilding process, to
create a modern city free from the past. 48 In Tokyo, perhaps for the first time, codes and urban planning could be married together with science and engineering to produce a city more resilient against environmental assault and take advantage of public and political interest in rebuilding. Or at least, that was the ideal goal.
46 Parrinello, Fault Lines: Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy .; Stephen Tobriner, Bracing for Disaster: Earthquake-Resistant Architecture and Engineering in San Francisco, 1838-1933 (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 210-20.Tobriner argues that although not always referred to as such, there were frameworks in place in San Francisco after the earthquake that set seismically-minded standards. 47 Fujisawa, The Great Earthquake of 1923 in Japan , 3. 48 J Charles Schencking, The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 154. 33
In the months following the quake, still under the leadership of Goto Shinpei, the existing planning apparatus created an ambitious rebuilding plan to redesign and rebuild
Tokyo, a plan that was bitterly contested by the now-homeless landowners and fiscally minded policy makers alike. The Goto plan hoped to create parks that could serve as both recreation and firebreaks, widen and straighten streets, create organized residential and commercial blocks, while repairing and improving utilities. Extra space was proposed to be taken from private land holders using the Urban Building Law’s land readjustment provisions, causing owners to lose as much as 10% of their burned-out lots without compensation. The plan was ultimately only later implemented in a stripped down form.
In the end, three months of intense negotiations saw the proposed national budget for the project fall from over 4.5 billion yen to a little over a billion, and finally to only
468 million as the scope of the proposal ultimately proved too expensive, too impractical, and too disputed. Opposing politicians and the Finance Ministry pointed out that Goto's initial plan was as expensive as the last three annual budgets combined. Similarly, citizens poised to have their land taken away protested the land readjustment, even while beginning unauthorized reconstruction. 49 Goto’s initial plans were deemed financially unrealistic and subsequent revisions were also whittled down to a tenth of his original idea. This demonstrated that no matter how real the concerns about subsequent earthquakes, and no matter how well-founded and researched the plans were, the government had to be willing to actually invest in thorough preventative measures to
49 Schencking, The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan , 188-225. 34 make them a reality. It also had to be willing to deal with an impatient or angry citizenry while doing so.
As the politicians debated, ordinary Japanese were tried to move on with their lives and were already rebuilding structures in the burned out areas, making future planned reconstruction difficult. Tokyo’s mayor wrote that barely “Before the ashes of the disaster had hardly cooled, construction of barracks or temporary buildings was started in various parts of the devastated area.” 50 Some open areas were specifically set
aside for temporary housing by the government in the aftermath, while other areas were
simply appropriated by the hundreds of thousands of Tokyoites who were now homeless.
This included businesses as well, wherein “Temporary wooden shops and offices put up
by individual merchants and firms” similarly sprang up throughout Tokyo. 51 Thus, as
Hewitt later observed, many citizens quickly sought to reorder their lives as they once were, while restoring productivity.
Despite the creation of greater anti-seismic and fire-resistant codes and zoning, the government intentionally relaxed these in realization of the financial and practical difficulty of Tokyoites in meeting them. People had to have somewhere to live and work.
The original intent was that these buildings would be removed at a later date when the financial condition of the citizens had stabilized. The reality, however, was described by a American historian touring Japan at the time, Charles Beard, in that “It’s not likely that the citizens who have restored production and business in wooden houses would readily consent to tear them down to make room for a new street and park lane” when the
50 Tokyo (Japan), The Reconstruction of Tokyo , 269. 51 Tokugawa, "The Earthquake and Work on Reconstruction in Japan," 229. 35 government got around to its task of rebuilding. 52 This observation would prove prescient
and the deadline was pushed back a number of times and not even enforced in some
cases, such as private housing.
Therefore, while attempting to set some clear standards to mitigate the damage of
future disasters, the government wasn’t always willing or capable of enforcing such laws
or willing to invest in an expensive future. Goto’s master plan to rebuild Tokyo
ultimately met with some limited success, in that a number of districts around Tokyo
were readjusted, making straighter, wider, and easier to navigate roads with sidewalks,
improved canal-ways, rebuilt bridges, and reconstructed and modernized water and sewer
systems. These improvements, however, favored business districts in their allocation,
while the housing or entertainment blocks tended to re-grow more on their own terms
without either the same regulations or amenities. Laws in general have the fault of
attempting to control or induce new practices after the fact, while their overall effect is dependent on enforcement or awareness. In the fear of not placing additional burdens on
Tokyoites or tearing down their new houses, the government let things slide, while the practical reality of Tokyo’s citizens was that they needed somewhere to live. Beard again put it best in that “The coordination of social and economic forces necessary to effect a comprehensive city plan, is a task of appalling magnitude.” 53 Tokyo’s efforts to rebuild a
more resilient city after 1923 were thus only partially realized, while Yokohama had to
compete against the nation’s capital for its own shrunken portion of the pie.
52 Charles A. Beard, "Goto and the Rebuilding of Tokyo," Our World April 1924: 21. 53 Beard, "Goto and the Rebuilding of Tokyo," 21. 36
Thus, though the Japanese had some patchwork legacies of attempting to mitigate earthquake and fire damage back to the Tokugawa period, it was only until just before the most deadly earthquake in Japanese history that building codes and planning were beginning to be married and implemented. This proved too late for two of Kanto's largest cities. The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake proved such a deadly disaster due to a combination of Japan's unplanned urban growth and the bare beginnings of a variety of seismic mitigation or prediction practices, without set frameworks to guide them. The ability of the central government to respond to the disaster in an orderly manner were also tested, and found wanting. Frameworks were created as a result of the earthquakes, perhaps beginning lines of thinking on how to produce cities and structures that were less ephemeral and were instead built to last. Unfortunately, the rebuilding process was left incomplete as plans, fiscal realities, and immediate needs failed to match up.
Japan would continue to be rattled by small earthquakes for another few decades before one last major one in 1948, and then settling into a long seismically quiet period until almost mid-1960s. Instead, the War would tear down Japanese cities nationwide, while the rebuilding process proved all too similar to that which followed 1923. Lessons about earthquakes or fire would be put on hold during the war and remain forgotten for decades thereafter until earthquakes began to strike again.
37
Chapter 2: Lessons Learned and Forgotten: The Pacific War and Postwar Expansion
Though many lessons learned from the disaster of 1923 were taken to heart, others were quickly forgotten or de-prioritized as Japan rebuilt from one disaster, while heading toward another of a completely different sort--that of war. The codes and planning practices that had been enacted were deregulated when Japan entered war with
China, and eventually, with the U.S. When the U.S. began its total war-oriented bombing campaign on Japan's urban centers, American academics and military planners were well aware of how devastating the fires of the Great Kanto Earthquake had been. The U.S. would proceed to re-create scenes from the 1923 earthquake throughout Japan with focused firebombing missions. Following the war, Japanese urban centers lay devastated and were often haphazardly rebuilt, a historical legacy manifested in earthquakes in 1948 and much later in 1995.
Though Japan was shaken by a series of seismic events between 1923 and 1948, no major earthquake struck Japan again until the mid 1960s, creating a long period of
'silences.' During this period, Japan continued on a path of heavy urbanization and population growth. This challenged planners, architects, and engineers to find technological solutions to the population problems, some of which engineered dormant weaknesses into the urban landscape. Efforts to accommodate population growth that increased earthquake vulnerability included buildings of increasing height and weight, the expansion of urban sprawl onto unstable reclaimed land, and cities that grew ever
38 more dense and crowded. Building codes were only slowly updated between 1950 and the 1970s. Lawmakers attempts to regulate fell behind the curve of technological development as buildings were constructed higher, taller, and on ground of questionable stability, and some solutions to space or population problems resulted in unintended consequences.
On the scientific side, seismologists looked to realize the full predictive power of their science starting in the 1960s. They never managed to predict any earthquake, though at the same time affected the public understanding of seismic risk. Some, like prediction supporter Mogi Kiyoo, looked not just to mitigate future disasters, but prevent them entirely in terms of human casualties. Such avenues of scientific pursuit, compared with a sudden relative dearth of major seismic events, would draw funding and attention away from mitigation or education efforts for decades to come. On one hand, seismology would continue to update architects' knowledge of how urban aspects performed under the influence of seismic forces, while expanding the ability of scientists to monitor the earth's movements and gather data. On the other, this data was used in creating predictive maps of dubious use and accuracy.
The War and Obstacles to Recovery: The Fukui Earthquake
Though Japan was menaced by a series of comparatively smaller earthquakes between 1925 and 1948, none of these seem to have produced the same redefinitions as the Great Kanto Earthquake, especially not with war on the horizon.54 Individually, none
54 Japan Meteorological Agency, Earthquakes and Tsunamis: Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Efforts , 3. Earthquakes and tsunami claimed the lives of some 16,500 people in earthquakes in 1925, 1927, 1930, 1933,19 43, 1944, 1945, 1946, and 1948 39 of these, with the possible exception of the last, prompted any change in laws or codes.
Tokyo's reconstruction was not declared over until 1930 and subsumed the attention of seismic events elsewhere. After the 1930s, Japan’s administrative focus would be divided until the end of the war. When Japan fully entered into conflict with China in 1937, it began to relax building codes, as many materials were needed elsewhere, while in 1943 it suspended the Urban Building Law entirely due to outright material shortages, sans provisions against fire. Unfortunately for denizens of Tokyo and Yokohama, the haphazard planning and forces of practical and individual need in housing produced a city with many of the same vulnerabilities in terms of fire.
American planners were well aware of this situation and specifically began a campaign of incendiary bombing against Tokyo and other cities in 1945, in an attempt to get the Japanese to quit the fight. In one night in March, ordnance dropped by Allied bombers killed as many as 100,000 Japanese in Tokyo. This scene resembled the aftermath of the 1923 quake, as the bombs produced massive firestorms. This would be repeated in major cities throughout Japan until the end of the war. 55 In a 1983 speech the
emperor Hirohito would lament that “Goto Shinpei designed a massive reconstruction
plan for Tokyo, a plan that if implemented, might have reduced considerable the wartime
fires of 1945 in Tokyo.” 56 That such a familiar scene played out was not just due to
Goto’s plan not winning the day, but also was because of a collision of priorities in
housing and material needs, funding, enforcement, and the War.
55 Mark Selden, "A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus , May 2 2007. 56 Quoted in Schencking, The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan , 307. 40
At least in the case of Tokyo, photos of the devastated city after the end of the
Second World War looked almost indistinguishable from those of the great quake 20 years before. In this case, the scene was repeated throughout Japan. Outside of the historic cities of Kyoto and Nara (intentionally avoided) and Sapporo in the north, most of Japan’s major cities laid destroyed after the war and the Allied bombing campaign.
Much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated entirely by the only atomic weapons ever utilized in combat. Japan soon formally signed documents and surrendered on
September 2, 1945 and began rebuilding under occupation forces whose goal was to demilitarize and democratize Japan, not necessarily rebuild it.
Many Japanese cities were completely or partially leveled during the Second
World War, while hastily reconstructed buildings in the occupational period repeated the
problems of post-quake Tokyo in 1923. Though the overall damage was greater still in
scope, Japanese leaders decided to focus on the immediate rebuilding of 115 cities in
which 2.3 million homes had been destroyed. The lost housing was combined with acute
wartime shortages, plus the smaller amount of housing required to be built for the
occupying Allied forces, as well as Japanese forcibly repatriated from overseas. This
created a shortage on the order of some 4.2 million. As planning had been the primary
domain of the national government since 1919, most cities (also lacking resources and
personnel), waited for the national government to take the lead, and did not begin to
make specific plans for reconstruction until almost the end of 1945. This was further
complicated by the fact that urban planning fell under the domain of the Home Ministry,
which was dissolved in 1947 and many of its experienced bureaucrats, including
41 planners, were purged from office until 1950. 57 Fiscal shortcomings were also an issue.
When reconstruction began on the cores of key cities, the government again tried to enact land readjustment under vestiges of the old Urban Planning Law. In 1923, 10% was contested by citizenry, while the government this time aimed to take up to 15% of private holdings without compensation. The occupying General Headquarters (GHQ), however, objected to this practice and forced the government to compensate landowners for their potential loss. Having to now pay for any land readjustment, on top of all the other costs of rebuilding, and advice from the GHQ to cut spending on urban reconstruction projects generally, many readjustment proposals were abandoned or scaled down dramatically. 58
Therefore housing rebuilt after the war would be constructed in a cost-cutting, hasty, and
unregulated fashion to fulfill an overwhelming need, while critical parts of many cities
rose with little guidance. Full recovery was years off, while this weak housing created a
legacy of seismic vulnerability that would stretch for decades to come. The first
earthquake to challenge this 'recovery' came in 1948.
The Fukui Earthquake of 1948 was its own 'triple disaster' of sorts, where the war
damage, an earthquake, and the local seasonal weather collided and human engineering
burned, collapsed, and flooded. The earthquake showed how readily undone an already
hobbled city was. The war had already destroyed 90% of Fukui's buildings. Some of
these had been rebuilt, though not to their former stature, nor their former strength. On a
summer day in 1948, housing built on the alluvial plane shook violently for 45 seconds
57 Ishida Yorifusa, "Japanese Cities and Planning in the Reconstruction," in Rebuilding Urban Japan After 1945 , ed. Carola Hein and et. al. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 18-27. 58 Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan : Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century , 164- 68. 42 under seismic forces, felling hundreds of houses never meant to be permanent, let alone have any seismic resistance. 3,769 people were killed, while the majority of the city's buildings were demolished for the second time in three years. 59
The Fukui quake also demonstrated that the harsh lessons of the Great Kanto
Earthquake were also forgotten, even before the war. A collapsed department store built in the 1930s that had survived the war revealed a large number of structural flaws not in correspondence with the building codes. An engineer examined the building and lamented, noting how transient memory was, with engineers merely going through the motions and hardly obeying the letter of the codes, let alone the spirit in which they were rewritten. He wrote that “As time passed and the memory of previous earthquake damages was dimmed, the average structural designer tended to follow the provisions of this standard in a token fashion only, forgetting the fact that a sound preliminary design consideration of all aspects was important.” 60 His words echo those of Kamo no Chomei
and speak volumes about the unmaking of knowledge.
The third part of the Fukui 'triple disaster' was a combination of wartime strains
on the environment and the poor timing of seasonal weather. William Tsutsui has written
on the devastation of Japan's forests during the war. As the net grew tight around Japan
toward the waning years of the war, the Japanese were forced to heavily log domestic
forests and other resources, using trees for everything from building material to a failed
fuel project. Forests were leveled, which had a serious impact on flooding. Without trees
59 BousaiJouhou, 1948 Fukui Jishin . 2012, 2-5, Disaster Management Office of Japan, 2/1/2016
water accumulated at a rapid rate. Levees for two of Fukui's local rivers had not come
through the earthquake unscathed, cracking or subsiding in places. Local authorities had
only given these emergency repairs in the light of immediate human recovery. Less than
a month after the earthquake itself, a downpour of 300mL of rain prompted large scale
mud and debris slides down local mountains. Both nearby rivers failed to hold the sudden
volume of water and levees broke. Water quickly inundated the already stricken Fukui
city and surrounding area, turning up to 60% of it into a lake. 62
The Fukui earthquake demonstrates the myriad of ways that seismic forces can
cause an engineered landscape can fail. Flooding is a constant problem in Japan, such that
almost all of Japan's major rivers are lined and rely on dikes to keep them under control. 63
Earthquakes can damage this type of engineering just as well as they can topple buildings. 'Recovery' is also not just a simple passage of time or strengthening of the economy. Because homes and other buildings constructed in Fukui were erected under less-than-ideal conditions and represent already-sunk costs, they were like to stay that way until demolished and rebuilt, or otherwise acted upon by an unexpected outside force. Unfortunately in this case, those forces were seismic. Thus a but recently-staggered
Fukui had a low threshold for subsequent disasters. The Fukui case demonstrates the acute vulnerabilities of housing built in a resource-stretched, unregulated postwar Japan.
61 William M. Tsutsui, "Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan," Environmental History 8, no. 2 (April 2003): 299-301. 62 "Fukui Jishin Saigai No Kaiyou," 3-4. 63 Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 13-50. 44
Post-War High-Speed Growth and Accumulated Risks
The Fukui earthquake was damaging enough to add a new upper range to the
Japanese seismic scale (7) and prompted continued revisions to a new building code that was standardized in 1950. The national Building Standard Law replaced the older Urban
Building Laws in 1950, bringing with it many important changes. The laws set out to
“establish the minimum standards concerning the site, structure, equipment and use of buildings to protect life, health, and properties of the people, and thereby to contribute toward promoting public welfare.” 64 The 1950s version was more explicit in its zoning
requirements regarding the need to guard against fire, requiring and defining
noncombustible materials in the use of finishing walls and roofs. The seismic section
included a required increase of buildings now needing to resist 20% (up from 10%) of
their lateral weight without collapsing. Additionally, Building Standard Law codes
specifically outlined allowable stress levels for wooden materials depending on type, and
accounted for factors of permanent and temporary stresses of tension (stress in two
opposing directions), compression (the opposite), shearing (stress in two opposing,
unaligned directions), and contact of steel beams themselves and their welds. Provisions
were also made for the testing of soil densities in determining the maximum weight
allowed on top of building foundations. Finally, new buildings within certain districts
were to only be constructed by licensed designers and overseers, while needing to be
inspected upon completion to ensure that the construction was indeed done properly and
up to code. Though these frameworks helped guide building (and city construction) to an
64 Japan, Building Standard Law and Cabinet Order, Ministry of Construction Ordinance Thereon (Tokyo: Housing Bureau, Ministry of Construction, Japan, 1958), 1. 45 extent, high-speed economic and population growth would soon overtake the ability of laws to keep up.
After the 1950s, Japan embarked on several decades of rapid economic growth paralleled both by a huge population increase--paradoxically at the same time, the size of the average household shrank as more people began living apart. This would prompt the construction of millions of new living units across Japan. In 1923, the population was just above 58 million, increasing to 93.4 in 1960, 117 in 1980, and topping off at around 127 million just after the turn of the century. During the same 1920-2000 period, the number of households quadrupled from 11.1 to 46.8 million.65 These statistics show the volume at
which housing and general construction expanded, wherein the Japanese both
implemented and discarded lessons from past earthquakes.
Japan was surprisingly earthquake-free from 1948 until the mid 1960s, and the
lure of complacency toward earthquakes was strong in the postwar period, even as the
population and the housing to support them exploded. As in 1923 unplanned and
hazardous swaths of wooden houses expanded across cities throughout Japan to house
millions of homeless citizens. Besides those who could find housing with families in
smaller towns or rural areas, the majority of Japanese urbanites were left to rebuild
houses themselves in a largely unsupervised capacity. Urban historian Carola Hein notes
that similar to the situation in the capital after the great earthquake, “In spite of some
deliberate planning attempts to widen major streets and introduce reinforced concrete
buildings, the majority of neighborhoods were characterized by flimsy wooden
65 Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication: Statistics Bureau, Historical Statistics of Japan . April 2012, 10/24/2014
Neighborhoods were constructed near or in the middle of industries for convenience's sake and were often within city centers. Planning, regulation, and enforcement varied from city to city, though generally occurred without oversight. Though some such neighborhoods in Tokyo, Kobe, and elsewhere were later rezoned, many survived untouched and inhabited by their original aging residents until 1995 and beyond. Older neighborhoods caused the newer parts of the city to be built around them. This pushed the city boundaries further out and also prompted some creative engineering over areas of land not originally suitable for development. In short, the continuing existence of older neighborhoods limited available development space and influenced questionable decisions regarding the manipulation of the environment.
Because of limited inner-city space, some buildings could only go up. Thus housing and public use buildings were increasingly built higher and higher, though more fire-resistant. In 1963, the 100 foot height limit of buildings that had been in place since
1919 was abolished, while the first dwellings above four stories began appearing in the mid-1970s. By 2000, about 18% of dwellings would be units in buildings at or over four stories high. All buildings of that height would be constructed with non-wooden materials. Steel reinforced concrete buildings were especially ubiquitous as they were
66 Carola Hein, "Rebuilding Japanese Cities After 1945," in Rebuilding Urban Japan After 1945 , ed. Carola Hein and et. al. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 3. 47 thought to be sturdy and capable of supporting tall structures, while also warding against the age-old enemy of fire. Spatial limitations were therefore overcome by going up, a marked change from a history where there were traditional fixed limitations on building height due to the threat of earthquakes. 67 This is all to say that Japan’s cities, some of
which had crowding problems in the prewar period, were even more increasingly packed
during the years of prosperity after the war and between major earthquakes.
Portions of urban environs were planned, though due to the ever-changing urban
geography and the continued drive to build, little was standardized. Cities spilled over
their original limits and merged or were rezoned into other entities. In his book on urban
planning, Andre Sorensen describes the repeated pattern: “As unplanned growth on the
fringe gradually is incorporated into the urban fabric, the characteristic pattern of
Japanese cities—bits of planned development surrounded by large areas of incremental,
unplanned development—is repeated.” 68 Additionally, The Japanese construction
business, supported from the political center, turned Japan into what Alex Kerr calls a
“Construction State,” which used every bit of space it could and attempted to cement and
control large parts of the Japanese landscape, including the overwhelming majority of its
major rivers and waterways. 69 Some of this was done in an attempt to limit the threat of nature, in the form of floods, landslides, and again, fire. This of course was partially inspired by the threat of earthquakes, or along the coastline, tsunami. Because of spatial limitations, all of this growth had to go somewhere.
67 Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication: Statistics Bureau, "Historical Statistics of Japan." 68 Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan : Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century , 5. 69 Kerr, Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan , 13-50. 48
As a result, not only did the Japanese engineer increasingly taller buildings, but they also overcame the confines of their natural environment through the widespread use of reclaimed land. This included expanding ports into areas once seas, filling in riverbeds or lakes, or removing hills or mountains to create level ground. In the case of Kobe, two artificial islands and an airport were created by removing and flattening two local mountains and using that earth as a port fill. Though as noted at the beginning, the
Japanese had been manipulating their coastlines or creating artificial islands (as was the case of Dejima) for hundreds of years, the postwar period by contrast experienced a boom of land reclamation projects throughout Japan. This included much real estate in some of the world’s busiest ports (Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe), and portions of inner cities
(Niigata, below). Former waterways or bodies of water were often simply filled in, paved over, and forgotten.
Land expansion based on coastal reclamation, however, engineered some serious earthquake vulnerabilities into many modern Japanese cities. As a pre-Kobe example, in
1964 the first major earthquake in nearly two decades struck Niigata. While the number of dead was thankfully small (32), about a third of the city was heavily damaged. In the case of Niigata, the urban sprawl had spilled far beyond the original city limits and onto reclaimed land that once constituted riverbeds. The damage to most buildings in the city was not from structural collapse or fire, though instead from a phenomenon called liquefaction. 70 In areas of relatively loose alluvial/sandy soil, earthquakes can reduce
otherwise solid-appearing soil to a form resembling quicksand, which can either bulge
70 USGS, "Niigata, Japan: 1964 June 16," Historic Earthquakes , 2014, 11/9/14
Additionally, older building codes were never designed with multi-story steel reinforced buildings in mind, something that was brought to light and partially rectified in a slow process after several 1960s earthquakes. The Niigata earthquake, combined with a
1968 earthquake near Hokkaido that inflicted serious damage on steel reinforced buildings built to the 1950s code, prompted a 1972-77 investigation by the Ministry of
Construction and produced a new seismic design method, resulting in a new set of updated codes by 1981, with a two-phase design. This was described as: “The first phase design…is intended as a strength check for frequent, moderate events. The second phase design…is intended as a check for strength and ductility for a maximum expected
50 event.” 71 That is to say, that building construction was to account for both more frequent,
smaller magnitude earthquakes wherein the building should at most take minor damage
though remain functional, while at least surviving the worst possible quake expected in a
particular area without collapsing before its residents could flee. Provisions were also
made to account for the increasing prevalence of heavy multi-story structures as well,
something only brought about in the first place by new building technologies. These
updates demonstrate the continued slow implementation of policies reflecting the not
only the latest earthquake-resistant structural knowledge, but also the science of
seismology, which contributed to the creation of new building codes, also attempted to
promise alternatives to mitigation.
Seismology and the Dream of Earthquake Prediction
Seismologists long hoped to one day be able to predict earthquakes, which along
with developments in the understanding of earthquake causes in the 1950s-70s and
promises to the government, led to the creation of institutions focused on earthquake
prediction. Theories of plate tectonics began to crystallize within this period, which held
that the earth’s continents moved via convection on beds of hot mantle, the cooling or
heating of which thrust portions of plates up or down. The collision of plates in turn had
the potential to release seismic forces among or along fault lines, some of which are
known, many of which are not. The solidification of this understanding, along with the
increase in earthquake-related data collection led many seismologists around the world to
71 Andrew Whittaker and et. al., "Evolution of Seismic Building Design Practice in Japan," The Structural Design of Tall Buildings 7 (1998): 94-96. Ductility is the measure of the ability of metals to deform without fracturing. 51 believe that the time for earthquake prediction was soon to come. In Japan, national panel of earthquake experts began to meet yearly beginning in 1965 to pursue various hypotheses that supposedly had the potential to be used in earthquake prediction. A
Coordinating Committee for Earthquake Prediction was established in 1969 and has a secretariat in the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.
The government took up decades-long sponsorship of seismological research into prediction, and gave a small committee the power to act on prediction data and recommend the evacuation of entire cities. In 1978, the Earthquake Assessment
Committee was created centered on the prominent prediction seismologist Mogi Kiyoo.
This committee, if so informed by staff and their instruments, would be immediately called to evaluate the potential of an imminent seismic event, thereafter having the power to directly recommend to the prime minister that an area be evacuated and that infrastructure and transportation networks be shut off. Moreover, so well-developed was the possibility that planners drew up frameworks of how to handle the announcement of an imminent earthquake forecast. These included clearing communications lines for emergency personnel, and ideas of where to send people to safety, or even how to avoid runs on banks or grocery stores as people scrambled for supplies. 72 Yet, never once has
this occurred, for an earthquake has yet to ever be predicted. 73
Thus, as Gregory Smits argues in his book on earthquakes, the 1960s and 70s were characterized by optimism: “although earthquakes are unpreventable, they might
72 Ichiro Watanabe, "Some Discussions on Countermeasures to Be Done After Issuance of an Earthquake Warning(Fifth Report)," National Research Center for Disaster Prevention, Japan March 1980: 124-25. 73 Dennis Normile, "Japan Holds Firm to Shaky Science," Science 264, no. 5166 (June 17 1994): 1656-57. 52 soon become predictable,” the result of which led to much money being pumped into prediction research. 74 Such studies came at the tune of more than 100 billion yen since the 1960s, if a 1994 article in the Yomiuri newspaper written by Tokyo University
geophysics professor Robert Geller is accurate. 75 Mogi was among the greatest
champions of earthquake prediction during the period described above and into the
1980s. His rationale for spending on prediction research was stated extremely simply in
that “since the possibility of prediction exists, active efforts must be made to minimize
the expected disaster by forecasting the [next] earthquake.” These efforts yet continue.
This research both followed international patterns of a reliance on technology and
instramentalization, but Japan also diverged and continued to look toward ordinary daily
human observation to discover earthquake precursors. Though much traditional
knowledge of earthquakes internationally originally relied on human observations, the
modern trend has been toward the heavy use of instruments. As Deborah Coen argues,
“human experiences of disaster no longer counted as scientific evidence.” 76 Thus,
seismological monitoring stations and tsunami buoys were installed to an increasingly
dense level in Japan during this period (there are now as many as 4,200 seismometers),
which monitor a large number of potential factors. Yet, in addition to forming perhaps the
world’s densest seismological instrument network, researchers have also chased endless
loose ends reported by local observers prior to earthquake events. This included such a
74 Gregory Smits, When the Earth Roars : Lessons from the History of Earthquakes in Japan (Lanham: Rowman& Littlefield, 2014), 132. 75 Robert J. Geller, "Cash Falling Through the Cracks: Money Spent Trying to Predict Earthquakes is Better Spent Preparing for Them," The Daily Yomiuri , May 12 1994. 76 Deborah R. Coen, The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 267. 53 diverse array as the unusual behavioral patterns of land animals or fish, changes in groundwater, or atmospheric phenomena that supposedly preceded some earthquakes.
Ultimately, these studies were more revealing of the human tendency to see patterns or make associations where none exist, while all of these folk or pseudo-scientific associations have since been debunked. Instruments too, however, have yet to yield the earth's secrets and predict an earthquake, as one potential precursor to a seismic event is found absent in the next.
Japan's legacy of preoccupation with prediction has affected the extent to which both local and national government(s), as well as individual citizens, have chosen to take preparations to mitigate earthquake damage. Mogi notes in the same article that that
“there have been no cases in which all three elements of earthquake prediction-place, magnitude, and time-have been successfully forecast,” a statement that is still accurate to this day. 77 Earthquakes cannot be accurately predicted, while the assumption that they could leads to complacency in construction practices or preparation. Those long-term predictions that do exist are not necessarily useful in immediate human terms, though they do affect policy and earmark funding for some 'high risk' regions and not other 'low risk' areas. Both Kobe and the Tohoku area, discussed in the next chapter, were considered 'low risk.'
The strength of architectural seismic design in Japan varies between regions and is based on some combination of seismic probability maps published by the Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and other agencies,
77 Kiyoo Mogi, "Recent Earthquake Prediction Research in Japan," Science 233, no. 4761 (Jul. 18 1986): 329, 25. 54 available local and national funds, and the willingness of local politicians to allocate money toward varying levels of earthquake preparation. The issue with such probability maps is that researchers believe the greatest likelihood of a major earthquake occurring will strike areas such as the southern coastal portions of the Kanto, Chubu, Kansai, and
Shikoku regions. 78 However, several major disasters to come happened outside of these
regions. Additionally, in some cases, the earthquake occurred along a previously
undiscovered fault.
These issues collectively comprise the 'silences' in between major events, all of
which lay dormant until the next disaster. Japanese postwar urban growth prompted many
unintended consequences, from an uncontrolled urban sprawl to land reclamation projects
forgotten about until earthquakes proved an unwelcome reminder. Seismology also
competed for resources while creating trajectories that would influence understanding of
which of Japan's regions were at risk, and understanding that did not live up to history.
This was demonstrated in the disaster was the Kobe Earthquake.
78 Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion, Probabalistic Seismic Hazard Maps .29, May 2002, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, 10/26/14
Chapter 3: The Kobe Earthquake and Beyond
On January 17, 1996, Kobe and the adjourning Awaji Island were struck by a
7.3M earthquake, which resulted in deaths over 6,400 people and injured more than
30,000--the largest single loss of life since the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the third largest toll overall in the past 100 years. Total economic losses totaled over $150 billion, with around 400,000 damaged structures, including around 100,000 of which collapsed completely. Some 175 fires broke out and consumed 82 hectares of structures, while the quake damaged many public facilities including schools and hospitals. 79 The 5:46 AM earthquake thankfully did not occur during transportation rush hours, likely minimizing casualties. However, of those 6,400 deaths, 5,500 were the result of the collapse of private homes, particularly older wooden houses built in the aftermath of the war.
Similarly, many of the remaining hundreds perished due to fires, many occurring within the same vulnerable neighborhoods. 80 Kobe's roads, power grids, water and gas mains,
and communication lines received heavy damage that inhibited response, worsening the
situation. Finally, Kobe's port, then the second largest in Japan and one of the most
expensive in the world, was damaged to the point of never fully returning to its pre-
earthquake state.
79 OECD, OECD Reviews of Risk Management Policies: Japan Large-Scale Floods and Earthquakes (Paris: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2009), 234. 80 NIST, "The January 17th, 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu (Kobe) Earthquake: Performance of Structures, Lifelines, and Fire Protection Systems," NIST Special Publication 901 (July 1996): 61. 56
Outcomes of the Kobe earthquake reveal the complexities of the city's planned and unplanned historical development, the uneven implementation of building codes, and the successes and spectacular failures of building technologies thought to be seismically resistant. Overall, buildings constructed according to the (then, most current) 1981 building codes performed well. On the other hand, pockets of mostly older wooden houses built in the immediate postwar period before any official scrutiny, and which housed the most vulnerable Japanese (older and lacking insurance), were hit particularly hard. Similarly, public buildings constructed prior to the code change showed higher collapse rates. In terms of high technology, a supposedly earthquake-resistant elevated expressway toppled over entirely, impeding rescue efforts. Much reclaimed land into which Kobe's port had spilled, constructed with a supposedly liquefaction-resistant fills, instead showed signs of subsidence. These factors affected who lived and who did not, as well as the ability of authorities to respond and provide emergency services.
Seismological maps also determined risk, the cost of earthquake insurance, and therefore the likelihood of individuals to carry earthquake insurance and have some financial coverage against seismic casualty. All of the above would prompt law and planning changes and new directions for research and the further implementation of anti-seismic technologies. The human factor which can ignore laws or rules, was also exposed.
Successes and Failures: The Kobe Earthquake and Its Aftermath
Earthquakes and other natural events can reveal the limitations of state-of-the-art technologies. As noted previously, Japanese cities built skyward to escape population limitations, creating increasingly taller buildings. One particular example of the state-of-
57 the-art was reinforced concrete buildings, which were built only with the notion strict rigidity. Concrete protected internal metal bracing. Reinforced concrete was considered the best defense against earthquakes until the mid-1970s. Yet, after smaller earthquakes during the 1970s revealed that these same overly stiff structures too easily broke rather than bent under seismic forces, codes throughout Japan changed to embrace designs with more give. What was therefore once widely adopted as a standard was overturned when seismic building provisions were rewritten in 1981. When the Kobe earthquake struck, the city's taller structures were a mix of pre and post-1981 buildings (including hospitals and other important public structures), which shaped the nature of the destruction as a whole.
Over half of the reinforced concrete buildings constructed before 1970 collapsed or suffered severe damage. These older building styles lacked the ductility demanded by the 1981 codes. One of the first extensive surveys of the performance of various building types after the earthquake notes that "While the damage to older RC buildings was severe, no evidence of collapse in any of the newer (post-1981) engineered structures was evident." It further concludes that "the Hyogoken-Nanbu earthquake is a vindication of the current code philosophies...The research investment seems to have generally paid for itself many times over." 81 That is to say that not only did the new codes save lives in
avoiding collapses, but in this instance also allowed newer buildings to continue
functioning as places of work or apartment complexes with only minor repairs, therefore
being both safe and a cost-effective investment against earthquakes.
81 NIST, "The January 17th, 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu (Kobe) Earthquake: Performance of Structures, Lifelines, and Fire Protection Systems," 155. 58
Laws and building codes themselves, however, do not account for either human error or peoples’ willingness to ignore them. Unfortunately, a number of post-quake investigations in Kobe also indicated that a number of buildings were not actually constructed to code, due to ignorance or time/cost-saving measures, evident of corruption in the construction business. For instance, a Yomiuri article notes that a professor of steel
structural design investigated damaged buildings around Kobe, finding that "All 20 of the
buildings that had collapsed and most of the others showed flaws in their welding and
design," while another that fell over was anchored into the ground using bolts less than
half as long as they should have been. He subsequently denounced the buildings that
"were shoddily designed without thought to which parts could be subjected to great
force," arguing that "Designers and others responsible for each building process must
have the proper management ability." 82 He furthermore notes several cases in the 1980s-
1990s, where buildings in Tokyo were similarly discovered to have poor welding, some of which had to be demolished, pointing to a continuing negative trend in actually constructing buildings to code. In 1995, however, due in part to the time of the earthquake in the early morning, most casualties were due to the devastation of private housing.
The overwhelming number of deaths during the Kobe earthquake resulted from the collapse of individual wooden dwellings and the resulting fires. These vulnerable areas were overwhelmingly those houses constructed after the end of the war, with heavy tile roofs and walls with little bracing. Under the side-to-side influence of seismic
82 "Building Defects Far-Reaching in Kobe," The Daily Yomiuri , Feb. 11 1995. 59 motions, the entire structure more easily collapses when the heavy top-load gets off- center. This was even more so in the case of two or three story housing that also functioned as small businesses, where single-floor collapses were common. This type of housing was the overwhelming cause of casualties during the Kobe Earthquake, while the majority of such structures were over 40 years old.83
These same structures were among the most clustered together from old postwar pockets of housing and the nature of their narrow winding streets inhibited rescue efforts all that much more so when they collapsed, even as fires spread more easily from house to house. By contrast, the study observes that "fire spread was limited primarily by wide roads, open spaces, non-combustible walls, fire resistive building construction and favorable weather conditions." 84 These older houses, under less favorable weather
conditions, could have been another Tokyo of 1923, where strong winds spread large
fires throughout the city, killing more people than the collapse of buildings resulting from
earthquake itself. Similarly, such neighborhoods had neither wide roads nor were
composed of non-combustible outer walls.
Kobe's port, one of the most expensive in the world to construct, also suffered
serious damage due to liquefaction, as did structures built on the two artificial islands,
Rokoku and Port Islands. Kobe's port was at that time the second most busy in Japan,
though port facilities were devastated by the earthquake and the port's shipping business
never fully recovered, slipping to fourth behind Yokohama and Nagoya. Much of the
83 NIST, "The January 17th, 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu (Kobe) Earthquake: Performance of Structures, Lifelines, and Fire Protection Systems," 157. 84 NIST, "The January 17th, 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu (Kobe) Earthquake: Performance of Structures, Lifelines, and Fire Protection Systems," 87. 60 damage was due to liquefaction of both old and new fill materials. To begin with, the
Japanese had been manipulating their coastlines well before the modern period and these older fills, being less compact with less dense materials, easily subsided. This poses unique problems in planning in that without surveys, even if a piece of land appears to have been a natural part of the coast for generations, it may not always have been. Even modern port fills and the artificial islands using other materials such as granite sand or mudstone, which according to all seismological research at the time was supposed to be highly seismologically resistant, showed clear signs of liquefaction. 85
All of this speaks to the complicated issue that building upon reclaimed land is
not advisable in the face of earthquake threats, yet many Japanese cities have nowhere to
expand to but out to sea, over former lakes and marshlands, through hills, or otherwise up
(in the form of skyscrapers), all of which carry certain risks. Using reclaimed lands to
expand port operations is common in Japan's larger ports. It's estimated that .5% of all
land open for construction in Japan is reclaimed in one form or another. While this
number itself is hardly large, the value of the assets sitting upon that land in port areas
like that of Kobe, or for instance, Minatomirai in Yokohama (incidentally, the spot of the
fourth tallest building in Japan), is not insignificant.
Finally, one of the most spectacular and embarrassing failures of the collision
between environment and technology was an expressway that ran through Kobe. Some of
the most commonly distributed photographs of the earthquake show a portion of the
elevated Hanshin Expressway toppled over on its side, which limited travel in and out of
85 Yasuo Tanaka, "Kobeko Rinkai Umetatechi No Moritsuchi Zairyo No Ekijoka Tokusei Ni Tsuite," Kensetsu Kougaku Kenkyuusho Ronbun Hou Kokushuu (1998): 143-51. 61
Kobe. Built in soft soil during the 1960s, the expressway fell due to a combination of liquefaction undermining its base as well as structural failures. Though all bridges and overpasses in Japan are designed with earthquakes in mind, as the chance of risk to the
Kobe area was thought by seismologists to be small, these structures were only designed to withstand a lesser-magnitude earthquake. The survey notes that “The difference between the maximum credible earthquake and the design earthquake, is clearly very large for this region of Japan.” 86
As demonstrated above, there are clear parallels between city planning,
seismically-minded building codes and transportation routes, and the resilience of an area
when an earthquake strikes. Looking at both housing and multistory multipurpose
buildings, the development and implementation of modern building codes such as those
of 1981 that stipulated a measure of ductile capacity for buildings and that they be
designed with the worse-case seismic scenario in mind, overwhelmingly saved both lives
and property. Outside of its citizens, the city’s most valuable asset, its port, did not fare
well in the earthquake. While some construction technologies showed promise in actual
practice, structures built on/through reclaimed land fared poorly by contrast. This was in
some respects a failure of planning and an unrewarded faith in technology, but also a
function of economics (reclaimed land is cheaper, maintenance of infrastructure
expensive), and a literal lack of room to otherwise expand.
Seismology, Insurance, and the Understanding of Risk
86 NIST, "The January 17th, 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu (Kobe) Earthquake: Performance of Structures, Lifelines, and Fire Protection Systems," 189. 62
Seismology has affected earthquake preparation in more ways than simply creating maps. Instead, how these maps have been used has affected how risk is evaluated in terms of insurance, premiums for certain areas, as well as individual perception of earthquake risk. The poor and the elderly, whose homes tend to be at the greatest risk of collapse under seismic effects, are among those indirectly affected by the results of such research.
On the personal household level, according to the General Insurance Rating of
Japan (GIROJ) statistics, at the time of the Kobe Earthquake only 7% of Japanese had earthquake insurance. This number is explained in part by the high premiums and low payouts. In terms of risk, earthquakes (should they occur) represent potentially massive liabilities, which any insurance company must quickly assess and pay out within a short duration--such an incident could quickly bankrupt an undercapitalized insurer. Thus, insuree premium rates were high and payouts low. Indeed, until only a few weeks prior to the earthquake in Kobe, the maximum payouts for houses and personal affects were fixed at 10 million and 5 million yen, respectively, or a little under $150,000. Even for owners of smaller homes, while such an amount would have helped rebuilding, it was quite insufficient to restore former homes and lifestyles completely. This limit was raised to 50 million and 10 million yen respectively at the start of 1996. Even ten years after the incident, insurees only rose to 17.2%, while around 35% had fire insurance with lesser earthquake subsidiary insurance. 87
87 Ichiro Nagashima, "Hanshin - Awaji Daishinsai to Jishin Hoken," Kenchiku Bousai 1 (2005): 35-36. 63
Insurers use seismic probability maps in part to grade risk by region, while taking into account insurees' buildings themselves. Insurance companies either increase premiums or offer discounts to individuals in supposedly less earthquake-prone regions.
Put another way, those in Kanto, Chuubu, or Kansai can pay up to three times more than those in Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, or the northern and southern ends of Honshu. This can unfortunately be a barrier to earthquake insurance in so-called high risk areas.
Nakashima Ichirou of the GIROJ warns that while areas like the Nankai Trough, where there is an 80% plus predicted chance of a major earthquake occurring in the next 30 years, that insurance rates don't reflect the unpredictable nature by which earthquakes play out. He argues that "earthquakes like the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake can still occur in areas where there is not a high chance of them and cause great damage," and advocates for more widely available affordable coverage. 88 Additionally, any additional house bracing or specific anti-seismic architecture houses possess, have (especially since the Kobe Earthquake) resulted in a variety of discounts, while wooden houses are more expensive to insure than non-wooden buildings. This potentially has in the long term, combined with government support, provided some incentive for homeowners to build new houses or retrofit existing ones to seismic standards.
Of course, it was in these same wooden buildings that housed the lowest income and most vulnerable populations to begin with. Looking into age breakdowns of those who perished in the quake reveals an unfortunate, if not surprising, trend. Around 53% of victims were aged 65 years or older, with many being crushed, burned, or later
88 Nagashima, "Hanshin - Awaji Daishinsai to Jishin Hoken," 38. 64 succumbing to injury due to too slowly receiving medical treatment. Many lived on first floors of homes due to the difficulty or inconvenience of climbing stairs, while many of the older houses suffered first-floor collapses. Pockets of these crowded houses collapsing together impaired search and rescue efforts. The elderly who lived in cheap housing were among the most unlikely to be able to afford insurance coverage of their properties, while as is often the case, had many of their assets tied up those same homes with so many structural weaknesses.
Authorities and city planners were apparently aware of vulnerabilities of such pockets of immediate postwar housing, though were averse to renewal projects that would break up communities of the elderly that were considered essential to day-to-day life. Instead, the earthquake physically devastated such communities, while the rebuilding further dispersed senior groups into less community-friendly temporary or (later) apartment housing. A year and a half after the quake, some 83 elderly who had been forced to live alone in temporary housing, were found to have died unnoticed. Suicide rates among the elderly also averaged as many as one a month, while others died to exposure from becoming lost in new neighborhoods. 89 Though Japan’s “Aging Society” has been a recognized phenomenon for several decades now and planners have tried to make some efforts in creating cities friendly to the increasing elderly population, authorities have found themselves in a difficult position between ensuring lives and ensuring lifestyles. 90
89 Noritoshi Tanida, "What Happened To Elderly People In The Great Hanshin Earthquake," British Medical Journal, 313, no. 7065 (Nov. 2 1996): 1133-35. 90 Bureau of City Planning, Planning of Tokyo 1992 (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 1992), 6-7. 65
In this regard, building a seismically resilient Japan is a difficult prospect in terms of protecting the vulnerable aging population that is a growing demographic of society, something that is often lost with a focus on technology, building codes, or urban renewal alone. The potential violent interaction between humans and their environment must also be considered on a smaller level. Risk is not as simple as divisions by region, knowledge of the earth's faults, or raw statistics, but also must consider the individuals living within given environments.
Navigating the Embattled Landscape: Emergency Response
When the earth turned against Kobe and the surrounding region, it affected individual structures, neighborhoods, and lives based on uneven historical endowments and contingencies. Though Japan had preexisting policy and response structures specifically developed to assist in responding to earthquake crises, these responses were quickly overwhelmed and hampered. Kobe became an embattled landscape where collapsed buildings or fires served as artificial barriers to evacuation or search and rescue.
The earthquake, which demonstrated how easily natural forces could expose weaknesses in even a modern city, modern infrastructure, and modern communications networks, prompted the rethinking of many laws.
Though the Diet enacted laws, such as the Large-Scale Earthquake
Countermeasures Law of 1979 well before hand, which defined roles and countermeasure procedures, communication quickly became a problem between agencies and emergency services within the city itself, while the national center was slow to grasp the developing disaster. Many communications lines were destroyed by the earthquake, while wireless
66 communication channels were overloaded in short order. On the local level, citizens struggled to evacuate and find serviceable hospitals. Of the 22 hospitals in Kobe before the earthquake, only a little more than half were operable, while local physicians’ buildings suffered similar damage. Citizens couldn't easily contact emergency services, while the hospitals that remained open had little way of determining the needs of and supplies required to treat incoming patients ahead of time, nor many methods of coordinating with police or fire services. Many hard-hit neighborhoods with a preponderance of collapsed structures were un-navigable by emergency services. 91 The deployment of the Self Defense Forces at that time was a convoluted one, and though search and rescue units were mobilized, permission to intervene in the situation was limited by the central government's ability to get a handle on the situation and go through established procedures to grant permission to units sometimes already waiting on site. 92
The earthquake damaged infrastructure throughout the Kobe area, severing the
communications lines, as well as gas, power, and water mains, and dramatically toppled
the expressway. Often times, the cause of these issues was liquefaction. Power lines can
be buried in Japan, which while being favorable aesthetically, also make them difficult to
get at and repair, and vulnerable to subsidence. When the authorities attempted to hastily
restore power, some of the lines exposed by the earthquake even sparked and caused
additional fires, demonstrating the difficulty of dealing with the phenomenon of
liquefaction and accounting for thousands of meters of buried wires. Some 1800 water
91 "Kenshou Hanshin Daishinsai: Taishin Iryou No Fubi, Sotei,". Mainichi Shinbun 1/23 1995, Maisaku Database, 11/8/2015
Modern cities and citizens rely on infrastructure to function in our day-to-day lives, and when these services are disrupted, chaos can quickly ensue. Cities are dark places without electrical lighting, rarely have alternatives to electric or gas heating (the earthquake was in January), and at least in the mid-1990s, still required an extensive web of interconnected lines to communicate. Modern medical techniques and emergency services are built around such communication networks, as well as running power and water. In their attempts to overly-quickly restore some of these services, officials only made matters worse and created additional fires with which there was little accessible water to fight. Wires were buried for aesthetic or practical reasons, to give way to foot and wheel traffic, which made them all that much more difficult for repairers to check for fault and repair. Modern emergency services, relying on large vehicles, also require open, navigable roads in order to function efficiently. In the worst areas, there were few to be found. A few seconds of a seismic event therefore turned a city upside down and modern infrastructure literally collapsed upon itself, while citizens and officials struggled to right their presumptions and come to a working understanding of post-disaster Kobe. The
Kobe earthquake was something of a wake-up call to policy makers, demonstrating what could come to pass in the absence of stricter mitigation and planning for earthquake contingency.
Planning for the Future: Post Kobe and Continuing Issues
93 NIST, "The January 17th, 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu (Kobe) Earthquake: Performance of Structures, Lifelines, and Fire Protection Systems," xxi. 68
The Kobe earthquake prompted several amendments to past building ordinances in an attempt to address some of the repeated local and national issues. The first was to order cities to identify sufficiently wide roads unlikely to be blocked in the event of building collapses and establish routes for emergency services. Green or open areas were also to be designated as potential evacuation and refugee sites and advertised to citizens.
Cities were to inventory and implement seismically resistant water storage areas that could be used for emergency firefighting. Finally, a clearer command structure and communication channels were laid out for the prompter reporting of needs, as well as determining roles when communication was impossible. 94 Any plans, of course, have limits when faced with the chaos of disaster, though in the least future responses have the potential to be more effective. Unfortunately, while some issues are being addressed, there is also evidence of the opposite, where laws are flagrantly flaunted.
As one infamous example of an architect blatantly constructing seismologically- shoddy buildings demonstrates, laws are not always enough. Former class-one architect
Aneha Hidetsugu falsified the seismological resistance data of almost 100 hotels and apartments, starting from just two years after the Kobe disaster and up until his arrest in
2005. Seismological calculations are complex enough to require computer-based calculations, while Aneha deliberately fed false data into the computer banks to make it appear as though the buildings were more sound than they actually were. For years his numbers were not thoroughly checked by officials. Aneha and related construction firms were thus able to save on expensive metals by under-reinforcing their concrete. This
94 See for example: Naikaku-fu Seisaku Tokatsu-kan (Bosai Tanto), Tokai Jishin Taisaku . 2012, 10/25/15
Hokkaido and elsewhere unrelated to Aneha. These buildings all had to be torn down at great cost. 95 Thus, while laws themselves are a start, they cannot exist in a vacuum— enforcement must also occur to create a more resilient Japan. Even when following the rules, construction companies and consumers don't always do all that they can to protect against earthquakes.
Japan before 1995 had no laws or incentives to help implement recently invented base isolation technologies, let alone programs to promote basic seismic retrofitting of older structures. The Japan after 1995 had incentive to do so. Perhaps the most major change in policy following the earthquake was the creation of long-term programs designed to aid in retrofitting existing older structures, such as those that so frequently failed in 1995. As was the case in 1923, 1995, and other instances when more seismically resistant structures and infrastructural lifelines are mixed in with older ones, both are at increased risk to fire, collapse, or at least slow emergency response, similar to the ‘herd immunity’ concept of inoculation. Formulated directly in response to the Kobe earthquake, the Seismic Retrofitting Promotion Law creates clear goals of retrofitting
95% of existing public buildings to existing code by 2020. 96 Additionally, though seismic isolation technologies (structures mounted on something like building shock absorbers) had been in development from the mid-1980s, the relative lack of a major earthquakes
95 Yotaro Hatamura and Kenji Iino, Taishin Kyodo Giso Hakkaku . 10/18/15
In attempts to address vulnerabilities in existing homes and structures, the government, motivated by the "occurrence of this earthquake, [whereby] people realized again that safety and a sense of security' form the base of life," passed acts requiring owners of public buildings to at least get seismic performance assessments of their structures. The government also provided subsidies for the retrofitting of both homes and public buildings. 98 Unfortunately, retrofitting rates can vary considerably depending on the seismic probability of the area, or even between areas with the same probability, depending on the ability and willingness of local politicians to secure and spend money on such projects. 99 Private housing remained a blind spot vis-a-vis consistently stringent building codes.
Finally, no matter what preparations are ultimately put in place, earthquakes can and will occur. When they do, the rebuilding process is a time when extra care must be
97 Yoshikazu Kitagawa and Mitsumasa Midorikawa, "Seismic Isolation and Passive Response-Control Buildings in Japan," Smart Materials and Structures 7, no. 5 (1998): 582. 98 Building Center of Japan, A Quick Look at Housing in Japan (Tokyo: Building Center of Japan, 2014), 71. 99 OECD, OECD Reviews of Risk Management Policies: Japan Large-Scale Floods and Earthquakes , 209-10. For instance, the report cites the more supposedly dangerous area of Kanagawa with a 89% retrofitting rate of schools, while projects in Nagasaki with a lesser seismic risk were 37% complete. At the same time, one ward in Tokyo was only 53% complete, while the three nearby wards stood at 96% retrofitted, despite having the same probable seismic risk. 71 taken. As has elsewhere been demonstrated by Charles Schencking writing about the reconstruction of Tokyo in 1923, the rebuilding process is seen as affording certain opportunities to make better, stronger cities that are not only safer, but also more ‘citizen friendly.’ Yet, as Schencking argues, grand plans for reconstruction are usually at best partially realized and often beset with limitations imposed from both above and below.
There are very real fiscal limitations to rebuilding from a government standpoint, as well as many questions on what takes precedence when such limitations are met. Laws outlining goals and actual reality don't always converge. From the citizen perspective, citizens first just want to be safe and life to quickly return to normal, while facing their own financial limitations, attachments, and emotions toward their losses. This is even more difficult in the absence of earthquake/disaster insurance for the majority.
Governments like Japan's, however, make such slow progress in rebuilding/renewing cities and retooling policies simply because of the layers of history that any city possesses. Earthquakes do not wipe the slate clean, but instead bring to the forefront a myriad of existing issues, while creating new ones, all at once.
72
Epilogue
The Kobe earthquake was Japan’s most devastating seismic event to close off the
20 th century, but it would hardly prove to be the last. Unfortunately, hard-learned lessons
from the past still continued to be implemented at an uneven pace. Seismologists have yet
to reveal the earth’s secrets of where and when earthquakes might strike, nor how strong
they might be. Technology offers some hopes for a more resilient Japan, though just as
many examples of how ill thought-out implementation can continue to cause unexpected
disasters. Earthquake mitigation and response frameworks continue to improve, though
require just as much public participation as official intervention to function.
In one instance, the disasters which Japan survived in the last century led Japan to
be hailed as one of the world’s most seismically resilient countries. Since 1960, Japan has
set aside September 1 as Disaster Prevention Day, an event that promotes education
among the citizenry and during which more than a million people annually participate in
various drills and undertake training. 100 Schoolchildren are required to know evacuation routes from schools in the case of emergency, while some locations provide hardhats to protect from small falling debris. Besides the basic building codes discussed here throughout, new innovations in seismic building technology are focusing on buildings which have bases isolated from seismic forces, or structures that sway naturally under
100 Kyodo News, "Japan Holds Nationwide Quake Drill on Disaster Prevention Day,". Global Post Sept. 1 2013, 3/25/2016
In 2007, the government implemented an earthquake early warning system, which automatically tunes any compatible radios or televisions to an emergency broadcast channel, informing citizens when an earthquake has occurred. Text messages are also sent to phones. Through their study of seismic waves and Japan’s dense seismometer network, scientists have discovered and been able to trace P(rimary) waves that do little damage and are an immediate precursor to more deadly S(econdary) waves that come a few seconds slower. 101 Thus, when an earthquake occurs, such early warning systems can give individuals precious few to tens of seconds to get to somewhere relatively safer.
These systems also automatically turn off such things as Japan’s high-speed bullet trains
(shinkansen), gas lines, factory lines, or elevators, potentially preventing additional accidents. 102
Unfortunately, many of these countermeasures either stem from past failures, or have been proven to still be insufficient. Early warning systems rely on electrical devices and the power can be knocked out, or cell phones turned off. With such a short window, whether or not everyone acts appropriately or recognizes the danger in a mere few
101 Lucy Birmingham, "Japan's Earthquake Warning System Explained,". Time March 18 2011, 3/5/2016
ephemerality of housing in Japan have changed, housing itself remains short-lived
overall. Even now among first-world countries, housing in Japan remains a
comparatively brief before being demolished and replaced. 104 Though some movements toward constructing long-lasting, durable structures has driven up the resilience of public structures, housing remains anomalous. In some cases, high risk housing remained in areas like Kobe until disaster struck, while in others new housing contributed to the urban sprawl and continual (re)construction of Japanese cities. The resilience of much private housing is unknown until disaster strikes.
Finally, the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake challenged many
presumptions about Japan’s earthquake resilience and the limits of human engineering.
Not only were as many as 20,000 lives lost and entire towns washed from the shores of
Japan, but the Japanese faced the meltdown of a nuclear plant, an old structure only built
to survive up to a lower magnitude of earthquake (M6.5), which was a far cry from the
order of what occurred (M9.0). When the 2011 disaster occurred, several hundred
citizens of one village chose to trust a tsunami wall that had protected them from
previous lesser tsunami in the past, and failed to evacuate. This cost them their lives
103 Jean Kumagai, "A Brief History of Earthquake Warnings,". IEEE Spectrum June 1 2007, 3/25/2016
Seawalls were constructed to keep water from entering, though without concern of how it might again exit, should such engineering fail to keep the forces of nature at bay. 106
Beyond the nuclear power plant and the radiation itself, the most costly portion of the
3/11 disaster cleanup was another hidden legacy of Japan's construction history: asbestos.
Asbestos, which can have deadly long-term effects on some human bodies was only banned by Japan in 2006 and had been used for decades before to strengthen buildings, or for its fire-retardant qualities. In the immediate aftermath of 3/11 (as well as after the
Kobe earthquake), countless Japanese may have been exposed to asbestos after they returned to look through the rubble of their homes, potentially exposing themselves to high levels of airborne asbestos. The consequences of this may not be known for years to come. 107
105 Smits, When the Earth Roars : Lessons from the History of Earthquakes in Japan , 172-76. 106 Philip C. Brown, "Reverse Flow: The Role of Built Environments in Shaping Disaster (Forthcoming)" (2016). 107 Brett Walker, IJS Lecture/Brad Richardson Memorial Lecture, "Natural and Unnatural Disasters: 3/11, 9/11, Asbestos, and the Unmaking of Japan’s Modern World" (Ohio State University, March 4 2016). 76
Conclusion
The situation in Japan after 3/11 was not as rosy as many media outlets portrayed it. The outcome could have been worse, to be sure, but it also could have been better.
Lauded technology has been shown to be overwhelmed by seismic forces, while even a prepared and educated populace continued to make a variety of very human choices that put themselves at undue risk. There is nothing 'culturally' unique about the Japanese reaction to earthquakes. Instead there is a long, bumpy history of experience with earthquakes and uneven attempts to brace structures and lives against seismic effects.
On the positive side, due to the high occurrence of earthquakes in Japan, but also due to the density and expensive technologies utilized in building there, earthquakes in
Japan have been far and away the most expensive in the world, though not the most deadly earthquakes on record. The bracing of Japan has been costly, but has also saved lives. Considering costs of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake ($210 billion in 2012 money),
Kobe (about $150 billion), Kanto (very roughly, some $50 billion), and the 2004 Chuetsu earthquake ($32 billion), Japan's earthquakes have been the most costly several times over the next highest country (Sichuan, China, $150 billion). 108 Excepting the 1923
earthquake that occurred in a developing Japan, however, its death tolls are considerably
lower than those of recent earthquakes and tsunami in India, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan,
China, or Haiti, due in no small part to the development of seismic codes, practices, and
108 "Japan Disaster Costs (INFOGRAPHIC),". The World Post March 10 2012
That being said, an investigation into the history of the development of seismic codes, planning, and the utilization of building technologies ultimately provides developing countries with as many (if not more) models of what not to do, as how to go about it successfully. Following centuries of major and minor earthquakes, it took one singularly devastating event in 1923 to bring together the then-disparate elements of seismic planning and design. Only after the Kanto earthquake did such frameworks come together. The codes developed from this incident were often unevenly implemented in periods of rebuilding due to the need for housing or population pressures, while the unplanned urban sprawl of Japan has largely grown unimpeded for decades. This was even as cities grew taller around pockets of older buildings, reacting to the limitations of local environments and Japan's dramatic postwar population growth. Technical solutions like the use of reclaimed land or increasingly taller buildings have been repeatedly shown to have multiple hidden issues. Codes themselves have also tended to lag behind the use
109 K. Crowley and Elliott J.R., "Earthquake Disasters and Resilience in the Global North: Lessons from New Zealand and Japan," The Geographical Journal 78, no. 3 (Sept. 2012): 211. 78 of new building technologies, while revisions are generally only made after major seismic events, of which there was a large gap in postwar Japan. Seismology has added practical elements to anti-earthquake frameworks, though just as often proved to be an exercise in unrewarded faith. These elements continue to be a problem in Japan post-
1995. Technology by itself continues to only be part of the answer and is just as often the core of the problem.
Nature's fury is unpredictable and an earthquake occurring at the wrong time and place within ill-prepared urban environs or elsewhere can be singularly disastrous. For the ultimate example of technology and nature gone awry, of course, one needs to look no further than the disaster of 2011, and the near miss of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Our cities are still strongly connected to natural environments, even though such knowledge often lies forgotten or ignored until disaster strikes. As the population of urban centers grows to unprecedented levels, research must continue on how to protect cities from natural disasters, as well as how to protect us from ourselves, our unintended decisions, and our well-meaning-but-often-awry technologies. Japan is not unique here, but bracing Japan is one part of an important global story.
79
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