The Journal of Japanese Studies

Alex Bates’s The Culture of the Quake is a significant addition to recent studies of cultural responses to disaster in Japan. Bates focuses on the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, a mega-disaster that struck at the [End Page 203] very heart of Japan’s largest city and cultural/political capital. This made the 1923 quake a far more devastating disaster than, for instance, the more powerful 2011 Tohoku quake, at least in the short term (there was, of course, no nuclear fallout), in terms of both human lives lost and traumatic impact on the society and culture. Surprisingly, scholarly attention in English has only recently begun to focus in depth on the vast and diverse array of cultural responses occasioned by this disaster: most notably, Gennifer Weisenfeld’s Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012), Charles Schencking’s The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (Columbia University Press, 2013), and two chapters in my edited book, When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan (Global Oriental, 2014): Leith Morton’s “The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 and Poetry” and Mats Karlsson’s “Proletarian Writers and the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923.” Whereas Schencking focuses mainly on socio-political responses, Weisenfeld on visual culture, and Morton and Karlsson on particular literary genres and movements, Bates’s new work is the first to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the full range of literary and cinematic responses to the disaster, from sensationalistic popular melodramas to high-cultural literary reminiscences, from old-guard naturalist I-novels to avant-garde neo-perceptionist (shinkankaku) urban fictions and Marxist social-realist plays and stories.

The inclusion of this wide range of fictional material allows for some instructive comparisons and contrasts—for instance, between popular melodramatic treatments of real earthquake stories (jitsuwa) in the mass media and in popular literature and the generally more muted and nuanced responses to the disaster by members of the high-cultural literary establishment (bundan); or between the politically charged responses of the proletarian writers and the more literary-technical responses of the modernist aesthetes. Altogether, Bates provides a satisfyingly complete picture of postquake literary and cinematic culture, a culture that ranged from mass popular entertainment to the radical experiments in artistic representation that appealed to the intellectual elite.

One of Bates’s most interesting arguments focuses on the impact of the disaster on the mainstream literary genre of the day, the I-novel, as practiced both by senior naturalist writers such as Tayama Katai and by younger White Birch (Shirakaba) writers such as Arishima Takeo and Satomi Ton. Although I-novels were written in response to the disaster—most famously, Katai’s Tōkyō shinsaiki (Record of the Tokyo earthquake, 1924), which Bates cogently depicts as the work of an “earthquake flâneur ” (p. 51)—the widespread devastation and loss of life, especially among the more disadvantaged Tokyoites who lived in the densely populated down-town (shitamachi) area, made the narrow self-preoccupation of such novels [End Page 204] seem inadequate to express the enormities of the new postquake reality. New, more outward-looking, more socially aware modes of writing seemed urgently called for, and the new generation of Taisho writers was eager to supply them. The earthquake did not initiate the famous debate between advocates of a hermetic, elitist “art for art’s sake,” such as Satomi Ton, and those such as Kikuchi Kan, who argued for an art that valued “content” over “form,” an art more open to the world, including even the new mass culture. However, as Bates points out, the disaster certainly instilled a new sense of relevance and urgency in this debate. By adopting a postquake perspective, Bates is able to throw new light on this and other debates that...