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Alex Bates : The Culture of the Quake: the Great Kanto Earthquake and Taisho Japan . (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies 78.) viii, 220 pp. Ann Arbor : Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan , 2015. $25. ISBN 978 1 929 28086 5 .
Reviews: East Asia
Alex Bates' monograph on literary representations of Japan's Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923 is a welcome addition to recent scholarly works on natural disasters in Japan, and on the Kanto earthquake in particular. (See for example Gregory Smits, When the Earth Roars: Lessons from the History of Earthquakes in Japan (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Gennifer S. Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923 (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012); Charles J. Schenking, The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).) This was a natural disaster that, as Bates notes, "struck the political, economic, and cultural heart of an empire" (p.12), but its effects were far from evenly distributed, being strongly influenced by what the author terms a geography of vulnerability, in which factors such as class, location, ethnicity and ideology rendered the impact more or less powerful. Bates' objective is to look at the representation of the disaster through three particular nodes. The first is through what is termed "high literature", when individual authors were forced to confront the post-disaster world; the second focus is on popular representations and melodrama; and the third focus is class and ethnic divisions that called into question the concept...