Reviewed by: Earthquake Children: Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo by Janet Borland Clara Bergamini (bio) Earthquake Children: Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo Janet Borland (2020) Harvard University Asia Center, 352 pages (paperback) $32.00 • £25.95 • €29.00, ISBN 9780674247833 In this detailed monograph, Janet Borland expands on the growing anglophone literature on the 1923 Great Kantō disaster by looking at how the catastrophe was central to the development of infrastructure and educational practices designed to prepare Japanese society for future catastrophes. A historian of modern Japan, Borland shows how children were central to the reconstruction of Tokyo's physical, social, and political landscape with earthquake-resistant schools and crisis preparedness education that has remained prevalent into the twenty-first century. While Tokyo remains Borland's central focus, she also explores how the Kantō disaster shaped national education standards and resilience infrastructure. To contextualize the Kantō earthquake and conflagration, Borland utilizes the vulnerability paradigm popular in disaster studies to provide an in-depth overview of the risks and vulnerabilities that primed Tokyo for disaster on September 1, 1923. Borland uses her first chapter to contextualize the Kantō disaster by following several architects and bureaucrats who identified many of the vulnerabilities that made Tokyo "a disaster waiting to happen" prior to 1923 (p. 14). Borland explains that Tokyo's predominately wooden buildings, geographical positioning, socio-economic inequalities, and overloaded public institutions (especially schools) made the city and much of its youngest population particularly vulnerable to large-scale earthquakes and fires. Bringing readers into the chaos of the disaster itself, Borland uses her second chapter to depict children's experiences of the Kantō disaster, from horrifying scenes in Tokyo's hardest-hit areas to the stories of those on the outskirts of the city. Using a collection of children's accounts that the Tokyo municipal government published after 1923, Borland provides unique insight into how some of Tokyo's young population experienced and remembered the catastrophe. Borland points out that archival sources depicting children's experiences with disaster are often limited, which makes her use of this six-volume collection of primary students' work particularly valuable for understanding how children experienced the catastrophe. Following the disaster chronologically, Borland's third chapter provides an overview of the days, weeks, and months immediately following the earthquake and fires by focusing on Tokyo's refugee crisis. By emphasizing the specific needs of children and infants, Borland highlights the experiences of populations frequently left out of disaster histories: children lost or orphaned during the disaster, infants facing starvation and illness, and those whose continued state of displacement made them vulnerable to natural hazards, such as Tokyo's cold winters. [End Page 188] Refocusing her analysis on adults' perspectives, Borland's fourth chapter analyzes the observations of doctors, teachers, and others who were invested in tracking and treating disaster-induced trauma among children in Tokyo. Borland shows that many of the stories that bureaucrats and others drew from this data positioned children as both victims and symbols of resilience whose hardships and ability to overcome adversity should inspire the public at large to dedicate themselves to "spiritual renewal and national construction" (p. 134). Borland's next chapter continues to follow adults' perspectives with her discussion of Tokyo's primary school educators who documented their experiences of the 1923 disaster in memoirs. Borland adds another dimension to what is often a state-centered depiction of how educational institutions responded to the Kantō disaster. Rather than using data from the Ministry of Education, Borland's discussion of teachers' personal accounts allows readers to gain insight into how teachers coped with a student body reeling from the loss of classmates, families, homes, schools, and communities. In her sixth chapter, Borland echoes some of the points made by Charles Schencking in his monograph on the Great Kantō earthquake (2013) by exploring how "elite commentators" interpreted the catastrophe as something that was produced through human failings. In some cases, these commentators viewed the catastrophe as a form of divine intervention while others looked to more concrete infrastructural failings that made Tokyo particularly vulnerable. Building from these critiques of the disaster, Borland follows debates between seismologists and educators around...
Read full abstract
Aug 31, 2023
Jaewoong Sim + 1
Open Access
