The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923: Notes on Japan's Modern National Sovereignty

Abstract

About thirty years ago, when I was a student at a Korean middle school in T city, Tokyo's suburb, best place to hang around with my classmates after school was local library. We would lounge around and, disregarding frowning eyes of Japanese users because of our loud giggles and conversation on top of our strange school uniform, which was a modified Korean dress, we would skim through many books and sometimes loan them out. One afternoon, we were looking at a photo-document book that recorded key incidents in first half of twentieth century. When we reached 1923 great Kanto earthquake, our eyes were fixated on one photograph. It was a picture of two bodies thrown out on street of Tokyo. If you were to look carefully, you'd see that one was a man, other a woman, her breast dug out and appearing as two black holes on chest. Their noses and eyeballs were gone, leaving two conspicuous round spots and one triangle on their face. Their thighs were covered with thousands of horizontal lines, which were obviously lacerations. The rest was covered under blood-stained yukata, Japanese summer outfit. We froze, speechless in terror, because caption below said the photo of two Koreans who were murdered byjikeidan or vigilantes. This horror for me was originary point of this inquiry into Kanto earthquake and massacre of Koreans that followed, an event I had avoided because of its very horror. The memory of it is instantaneously revived from my adolescence whenever I face subject of great earthquake.1 In this article, I'd like first to reconstruct a sketch of what happened when earthquake occurred and soon after that. I shall then move on to explore why it was Koreans who came to be placed at center of Japanese citizens' rage, resulting in torture and massacre. Rather than turning to area of social psychology and psycho-somatic explanation of mob violence, trying to understand event in terms of mass hysteria, panic, or role of rumor, I attempt to grasp a cultural logic behind this ethnic violence. In my view, 1923 massacre of Koreans in Japan is indissolubly connected with historical process of emergence of Japan's modern national sovereignty. Although this theme itself requires closer and more thorough investigation and analyses, for purpose of this article I present a preliminary exposition by relying on Giorgio Agamben's thoughts and Japanese ethnologist Origuchi Shinobu's insights. I propose to focus on Japan's modern sovereignty and its national substance: constitutive unit of Japanese nation is conditioned upon person being born Japanese. The birth right, which is at once pre-modern and unchangeable, became pre-requisite to obtaining a membership to modern Japanese nation-state. I argue, below, that as far as this principle is concerned, there has been no fundamental change in Japan today-except for a brief interval toward end of colonial Empire. In other words, emergence as well as maintenance of Japan's modern national sovereignty is closely connected with exclusion of non-Japanese. With these in mind, let me unfold my thoughts. On September 1, 1923, at 11:58 a.m., earthquake of magnitude 7.9 violently shook Kanto region encompassing Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, and other prefectures in vicinity. During that day a total of 114 tremors were felt. In Tokyo only, a total of 187 major fires were recorded, which spread all over metropolis in no time, burning down residential homes, industrial premises, and public buildings. It is said that death toll reached somewhere between 100,000 and 140,000. The authorities and residents were totally unprepared for a disaster of this magnitude. Due to a complete lack of reliable information people panicked and became extremely susceptible to rumors. Amidst this chaos, one population group was singled out as object of persecution, or extermination to be precise-Koreans. …