Giving Most and Giving Differently: Humanitarianism as Diplomacy Following Japan’s 1923 Earthquake*

Abstract

In December 1923, the Japanese Emergency Earthquake Relief Bureau [Rinji shinsai kyūgo jimukyoku] (EERB) took an action that could have been diplomatically disastrous: It sold flour and wheat.1 These commodities were not ordinary bags of agricultural sustenance, but rather humanitarian relief supplies donated by the United States following Japan’s most deadly and destructive natural disaster of the modern era. Months earlier, knowledge that Soviet officials had sold grain overseas while receiving relief supplies from the American Relief Administration (ARA) so vexed Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover that he terminated assistance provided under the Russia Famine Relief Act of 1921. No such reprisal occurred against Japan. Rather, American officials both in Japan and the United States pre-emptively defended Japan’s decision to sell donated goods and suggested it was guided by “common sense.”2 Endorsing the sale of relief wheat and flour was not the only anomaly associated with one...