Earthquake Children: Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo by Janet Borland

Abstract

Reviewed by: Earthquake Children: Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo by Janet Borland Kaori H. Okano (bio) Earthquake Children: Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo. By Janet Borland. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. xx, 300 pages. $60.00, cloth; $32.00, paper. Earthquake Children: Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo is an absorbing book that presents well-documented historical research through reader-friendly narratives. The book takes a journey to Tokyo in the 1920s, covering time both before and after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake which destroyed the city. Through examination of hitherto unstudied primary sources, the book narrates the vivid and emotional stories of how children experienced and made sense of the earthquake, how teachers and other adults interpreted the children's experience, and the subsequent initiatives to develop disaster-preparedness in the public. The book is driven by three major research questions. How did Japan become one of the most well-prepared societies for coping with natural disasters? What roles did children play in this process? How were their voices used in pursuing larger political and ideological goals? The book demonstrates that children's traumatic experiences of the earthquake evoked emotional responses among the adult population. This response led them to see children as the focal point in their attempts to nurture both physical and mental resilience among the public. Schools came to be seen as potential centers of safety and shelter for children and the wider community, well beyond just a place for children's learning. The book argues that Japan became disaster-prepared both materially (through building codes and planning) and in terms of people's behaviors and attitudes (by maintaining composure and through practical evacuation skills) because of deliberate [End Page 195] and incremental efforts based on experience of disasters, and that this effort can be traced back to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. The book is cohesive in its structure. Chapter 1 describes the city of Tokyo shortly before the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Tokyo in the early twentieth century included vulnerable geographical conditions and disadvantaged people; it was full of wooden residential houses and public buildings (including schools). Two years prior to the earthquake, the 1921 Asakusa Fire destroyed wooden school buildings and killed or injured many children inside them. As a result, authorities began to build primary schools of reinforced concrete. When the Great Kanto Earthquake demolished the city in 1923, these new buildings withstood the tremors and provided safe refuge for children and residents. Borland narrates initial confusion, chaos, and fear in the face of the deaths and injury of family and friends and desperation in seeking refuge (chapter 2). Drawing on children's essays and drawings, newspaper photographs, and media descriptions as primary sources, she effectively documents the graphic picture of the experience on the ground and how vulnerable children, whose voices were often absent from the narratives on the earthquake, made sense of what they encountered. Chapter 3 illuminates public sympathy and emotional response to children's struggle and loss, when reported in the media. Teachers and adults saw not only children's sadness and struggles but also resilience and resolve to overcome adversity, which gave them a sense of hope in pursuing a recovery. Teachers, government offices, and the media used this overwhelming emotional response to children's experiences as an instrument to encourage the public to move forward, by fostering hope, resilience, and reconstruction. Children were considered agents of recovery. Teachers' accounts of the earthquake and its aftermath (chapter 4) are as dense and evocative. Witnessing the destruction with shock, sorrow, and fear, teachers immediately responded as relief workers, carers, and educators; they resumed classes at ad hoc temporary schools in barracks, hoping that this would give children a sense of routine amid the chaos, even before education authorities issued instructions. These bottom-up initiatives by teachers as a collective to address children's urgent needs have been observed throughout the history of schooling, including in the case of new migrant children in recent years. Such traumatic experiences led to an acknowledgment that the society was not adequately prepared for minimizing the impact of natural disasters, in part due to moral weakness (individual selfish...