Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire That Helped Forge the Path to World War II

By Joshua Hammer

Book Overview

Yokohama Burning is the story of the worst natural disaster of the twentieth century: the earthquakes, fires, and tsunamis of September 1923 that destroyed Yokohama and most of Tokyo and killed 140,000 people during two days of horror.

With cinematic vividness and from multiple perspectives, acclaimed Newsweek correspondent Joshua Hammer re-creates harrowing scenes of death, escape, and rescue. He also places the tumultuous events in the context of history and demonstrates how they set Japan on a path to even greater tragedy.

At two minutes to noon on Saturday, September 1, 1923, life in the two cities was humming along at its usual pace. An international merchant fleet, an early harbinger of globalization, floated in Yokohama harbor and loaded tea and silk on the docks. More than three thousand rickshaws worked the streets of the port. Diplomats, sailors, spies, traders, and other expatriates lunched at the Grand Hotel on Yokohama's Bund and prowled the dockside quarter known as Bloodtown. Eighteen miles north, in Tokyo, the young Prince Regent, Hirohito, was meeting in his palace with his advisers, and the noted American anthropologist Frederick Starr was hard at work in his hotel room on a book about Mount Fuji. Then, in a mighty shake of the earth, the world as they knew it ended.

When the temblor struck, poorly constructed buildings fell instantly, crushing to death thousands of people or pinning them in the wreckage. Minutes later, a great wall of water washed over coastal resort towns, inundating people without warning. Chemicals exploded, charcoal braziers overturned, neighborhoods of flimsy wooden houses went up in flames. With water mains broken, fire brigades could only look on helplessly as the inferno spread.

Joshua Hammer searched diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts and conducted interviews with nonagenarian survivors to piece together a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe. But the author offers more than a disaster narrative. He details the emerging study of seismology, the nascent wireless communications network that alerted the world, and the massive, American-led relief effort that seemed to promise a bright new era in U.S.-Japanese relations.

Hammer shows that the calamity led in fact to a hardening of racist attitudes in both Japan and the United States, and drove Japan, then a fledgling democracy, into the hands of radical militarists with imperial ambitions. He argues persuasively that the forces that ripped through the archipelago on September 1, 1923, would reverberate, traumatically, for decades to come.

Yokohama Burning, a story of national tragedy and individual heroism, combines a dramatic narrative and historical perspective that will linger with the reader for a long time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743264665
• ISBN13: 9780743264662
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Definitive Study of Japan's 1923 Earthquake

Joshua Hammer has pulled out all the stops with this new and timely book about the 1923 earthquake that struck Yokohama. It is an extensive review of events prior to the quake, with details about Akitsune Imamura, later Chairman of the Seismology Department, Tokyo Imperial University, who correctly predicted the coming horror. I like this book, because it gives the reader a before and after look at all the key players involved, including the embassy and Naval personnel, U.S. professors, and other well-known travelers of that day, whose involvement is important to the story. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's hotel, which was built to withstand an earthquake, plays a prominent part of the story. Hammer has done significant research that is written in a style which can be understood by academic and layman alike. When detail is needed about how the science of Seismology was developed, it is not so technical, that one cannot understand it. Foreshadowing the Japanese militaristic movement and the massacre of Koreans that followed in the wake of the earthquake by the Japanese, is important to the story. I also liked the link drawn between what happened then, in the diplomatic aftermath, and our current world situation via the current U.S. involvement in humanitarian missions. This is an indispensible resource for the student of pre-Pearl Harbor intelligence: it includes the sidebar stories of spy intrigue that was going on prior to the quake. The author's footnotes are extensive and his sources are well-mined for all the included rich detail. My highest recommendation.

A Forerunner For The Near Future?

Tying together the declining hopes for democracy in Japan after the hub of foreigners in Yokohama was wiped out by the earthquake amid the eruption of social violence against Koreans by government sanctioned vigilantes, Hammer makes an intriguing historical argument. A lack of follow through on evidence of related change combined with a flawed narrative that focuses entirely too much on the foreigners, especially relatively obscure ones, rather than the Japanese themselves, sinks the book at times. Hammer spends ample time on the amazing relief effort mounted by America (primarily) to respond to the disaster, including the mobilizing of the Asiatic Fleet to sail into Japanese waters with abundant relief supplies and an open hand of friendship to the Japanese people, yet only in passing explains the hostility among many Americans towards Japan from before the quake and certainly after the false media reports claiming Japanese arrogance in the face of the unprecedented relief effort. Nevertheless, its a richly detailed and fascinating read about a disaster that may be a forerunner for the caliber of devastation to be seen in seismic risk sectors like Caracas, Venezuela and Tehran, Iran, to say nothing of dozens of other supercities horizontally spread far and wide with slums packed with millions of teeming masses.

Been there

My husband and family used to live in Yokahama and they loved the book.