The Changing Character of Disaster Victimhood

Critical Asian Studies, 2016
Vol. 48, No. 3, 356–379, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2016.1199374
The Changing Character of Disaster Victimhood: Evidence from Japan’s

“Great Earthquakes”
Gregory Clancey*
Department of History and Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore, Singapore,
Singapore
ABSTRACT: Japan is periodically wracked by “Great Earthquakes” (daijishin) – seismic

events so destructive that they leave massive amounts of textual and graphic evidence,
much of it produced by people who did not experience the events directly. Using this cache
of information, it is possible to see how the idea of the “disaster victim” has changed over
time and circumstance. My paper traces this role across five Great Earthquakes that spanned
roughly 150 years (1855–2011), a period convergent with modern Japan. I will argue that
the sense of who and what has been victimized by the shaking of the earth – who has
suffered, what weight to attach to their loss, what actions to take and emotions to feel
regarding their situation – has changed regularly, and surprisingly, over this rather short
period. There is, in other words, no common Japanese experience of victimhood, even in
the context of one disaster type over a relatively short historical period. The article is one
contribution to an as-yet unexamined history and comparative study of the modern role of
disaster victim.
Keywords: earthquakes; disasters; Japan; victims; history
Introduction
The scholarly literature on natural disaster has grown exponentially in the last two decades, influ-
enced partly by related concerns with climate change and terrorism, and by more immediate
public exposure to natural disasters worldwide through the twenty-four hour news cycle. The per-
ception that natural disasters are increasingly in frequency and cost, particularly in Asia, has also
captured the imaginations of scholars and policy-makers.1 While books and articles on disaster
Correspondence Address: Gregory Clancey, Tembusu College, National University of Singapore, 28 College
Ave. East, B1-01, Singapore 138598, Singapore. Email: hisgkc@nus.edu.sg.
1
This viewpoint is well-summarized by my colleague Michael Douglass (Douglass 2013) who links the
increasing costliness of natural disaster (and hence its greater visibility among global policy-makers) to bur-
geoning urbanization and tighter inter-linkage between urban and non-urban landscapes. This is slightly
different than the claim that, even accounting for climate change, there are simply more such natural
events, or that they are not natural but man-made, which is also common if more controversial in disaster
studies literature.
© 2016 BCAS, Inc.

Critical Asian Studies 357
were previously few and thematically isolated, they are now regular and convergent enough,
coming from all fields and pertaining to many more regions of the world, to constitute a genre.2
The sub-genre of disaster history, formerly dominated by journalists and popular writers, is
also increasingly engaging professional historians. There is increasing recognition that sudden-
onset natural events may have shaped social and political history far more than earlier accounts
recognized.3 The growing historical reading list on disasters is still not as theoretically or thema-
tically convergent as social science writing on the same topic, though that is not necessarily a flaw.
An influencing factor is the extreme differentiation that historians note in the social and political
responses to natural disasters across time and space, as well as differences in the characteristics of
disaster types, which social science writing tends to minimize in the search for thematic or meth-
odological unity. Historians also tend to be attracted to disastrous events for different reasons than
scholars in other disciplines: because they generate richer and larger caches of evidence than
periods of comparative normality and/or because they severely disrupt existing patterns. There
is also a growing recognition that natural disasters have contributed to long-term social, political,
and even scientific change. These very same concerns, however, often lead historians of disaster
to focus on only one or two events at a time, thus missing the opportunity to draw comparative
conclusions from a broader set of cases or sweep of time.4
In this article, I seek to correct this imbalance by following one thematic thread – victimhood
– across five large and destructive earthquakes in a single country – Japan – over a period span-
ning three different centuries. Disasters by definition create victims. Yet in histories of natural dis-
aster, victimhood is often a less prominent narrative theme than, for example, reconstruction, the
politics of locating blame, or scientific and engineering conflicts and/or innovations. Victimhood
is a more prominent theme in accounts of contemporary social scientists working in disaster
zones, and often central to their stories about “recovery,” largely because survivors are present
and can be surveyed, interviewed, observed, and photographed. In historical documents,
however, victims are often vaguely or idiosyncratically sketched out. This is partly due to the
shape and character of authorship: those who step into the disaster zone from the outside to
report, assist, control, blame, plan, rebuild, and sometimes exploit, generally leave many more
records than the traumatized, terrified, and impoverished survivors. Disaster victims, in that
sense, may be the ultimate historical subalterns.
But then who is a victim? There is also the reality – underappreciated in much of the disaster
studies literature – that the identity of the “disaster victim” is historically and culturally contin-
gent. Declaring all people living within a disaster zone to be undifferentiated victims may be a
modern instinct, which likely arose with the propensity (and ability) of nation-states to declare
and draw boundaries around catastrophes, and frame everyone within as having suffered a
common experience. On the other hand, we now seem to be entering a postmodern condition
of victimhood, in which mainstream and social media, along with NGOs, help to create new cat-
egories and grades of victimhood which in many instances complicate or go well beyond state
2
For an accessible overview of this phenomenon see McEntire and Blanchard 2005.
3
Taking just the example of Japanese earthquakes, recent historical scholarship has made a significant case
for their political and cultural importance. See particularly Smits 2014; Schencking 2013; Orihara and
Clancey 2012; Borland 2006; Clancey 2006a; and Hammer 2006. A similar case has been made for the Phi-
lippines by Bankoff 2003, and for Argentina by Healey 2011. For a recent discussion of the historiography of
disaster see Dahlberg, Rubin, and Vendel 2016.
4
Some recent histories of disaster (particularly those written in and about the United States) do treat the
theme more broadly and thematically. See for example Knowles 2013; Rozario 2007; Biel 2002; and Stein-
berg 2000. For the global history of earthquakes and the experts who study them, see Coen 2014; and De
Boer and Sanders 2007.
358 G. Clancey
attempts to frame and manage disaster sites and their inhabitants. As victimhood has become an
increasingly common social (and especially psychological) role across a whole range of con-
ditions, disaster victimhood becomes only one of many varieties, all with the potential to mutually
influence and reinforce one another. There is likewise a tendency to see victimhood through the
lens of relief and/or reconstruction, as these are the dominant contemporary responses to disaster
events. While acts related to relief of various sorts (such as seeking it, receiving it, or having it
withheld) can always be found in the historical record, there are other sets of instincts, actions,
and representations of victimhood which have been equally present, and might be missed by
focusing too exclusively on post-disaster aid.
Japan’s “great earthquakes” (daishinsai) provide one useful window into the changing nature
of disaster victimhood.5 They have occurred often enough, and in each case produced so much
written and graphic material, that they help trace out any number of changes in social and political
actions and perceptions. I have elsewhere argued that this evidence contradicts the perception,
current just after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, that there is a common “Japanese
experience” of natural disaster which has deeply shaped the “Japanese national character.”6 I
will revisit that argument here, but focus more carefully on the changing nature of victimhood
over this same period, the 1850s to the 2010s. I argue that generalizations regarding the nature
of victims, and their comparative weaknesses and strengths, are difficult to craft even for one
country, one disaster type, and across an era characterized as “modern.”
In exploring the category of disaster victim my attention will be on both the survivors and the
dead. More particularly it will be on their depiction in narratives which arose and became domi-
nant in the aftermath of each event. While it is true that each disaster victim has his or her own
personal story, in every such instance a collective portrayal of victimhood also arises in various
media. These include woodblock prints; photographs published in books, newspapers and as post-
card images; written accounts of all types; and images and commentary on television broadcasts
and social media postings. Those who produce this material are sometimes survivors themselves,
but other times outside observers. This also makes a difference in how victims are portrayed in
each instance.
Clearly the person who is wounded, searching, or mourning for a lost loved one, is homeless,
or is emotionally and mentally shattered by an event, is a figure transcending time. So too is the
instinct to help such a person, and thus the presence of relief-givers. But beyond these and a few
other common human reactions or conditions, the specificities of culture, politics, social relations,
and timing render each disaster site unique. My comparative approach is thus not a search for gen-
eralizations so much as an historical critique of attempts to over-generalize.
Disasters represent a failure of protection, the blame for which sometimes remains with
nature, or the gods, but other times is placed on political actors, experts, or the victims themselves.
Disaster victimhood can therefore incorporate a very wide range of attitudes toward the idea of
protection – how and why it failed, whether it was possible in the first place (inevitability vs.
incredulity), and whether authorities are properly exercising it in the aftermath. On this last
5
The term “great earthquake” (daijishin) or “great earthquake disaster” (daishinsai) are commonly reserved
in Japanese for the most destructive events, generally those which have occurred since the Meiji Restoration
of 1868. The term also carries a sense of national as opposed to regional significance, which means that even
the very destructive Meiji Sanriku Earthquake and Tsunami of 1896, which killed over 20,000, is not so
designated because the country’s urban heartland was unaffected. For the sake of space my own narrative
will follow only the five great earthquakes of the modern period, plus the Ansei Edo disaster, recognising
that the topic could be developed much further by taking the so-called regional or lesser destructive earth-
quakes into consideration.
6
Clancey 2011.
point, one could also say that disasters open the space for new forms or degrees of protection to be
discussed and promoted, though an increased level of safety is never a guaranteed outcome of
such soul-searching.
All of these attitudes and more have been documented in the history of Japan’s “great earth-
quakes.” five of which I will consider below.
Edo, 1855
The earthquake that devastated Edo (now Tokyo) in 1855 has been a common starting point in dis-
cussions of modern Japanese catastrophe. Now known as the Ansei Edo Earthquake, it occurred just
at the boundary between the old (Shogunal) regime and the new (Imperial) one, and indeed may have
contributed in some ways to the transition. Because it occurred in Japan’s principal city, then one of
the largest in the world, it also left an unprecedented cache of graphic and written accounts. The most
famous and informative of these are the many dozens of “catfish prints” (namazu-e), allegorical wood-
block-printed broadsheets (kawaraban) in which the earthquake is depicted as a catfish, surrounded
by deities and human figures representing various Edo social groups.7
The perspectives of the catfish prints are startling to modern sensibilities. We have been
trained to see disasters either as equalitarian in their miseries or as disproportionally affecting
the poor, marginalized, or socially vulnerable. One lesson these prints impart about victimhood
is its ambiguity. In many of these surviving prints, it is Edo’s rich merchants and landlords
who are portrayed as “victims” of the earthquake, in that the disaster forced them to cough up
(sometimes literally) gold coins to fund the city’s reconstruction. The working people of Edo, par-
ticularly tradesmen such as carpenters, tatami-makers, plasterers, and those who made all manner
of household equipment, are portrayed in the same prints as having been enriched by the rebuild-
ing process, and even welcoming of the earthquake. The catfish emerges in this genre as a power-
ful deity favouring some and punishing others, not so much through death or survival as through
the redistribution of wealth and opportunity following the catastrophe. Prostitutes and courtesans
(at least those who survived the terrible destruction of the elite pleasure quarter of Shin-Yoshi-
wara) are also often depicted as on the catfish’s side, because the tradesmen spend so much of
their new-found wealth in rebuilt pleasure districts. Gregory Smits has described the atmosphere
of these prints as “carnivalesque,” although they are also highly ironic and arguably more censor-
ious than celebratory; a commentary replete with dark humor on the realities of a world tempor-
arily turned upside down.8 The printmakers are almost all anonymous given that their messages
were considered subversive enough to censor, but the fact that such prints began to be produced
within days of the disaster, combined with the diversity of their styles and messages, suggest a
spontaneous outpouring on the part of Edo’s creative classes, and an attempt to reflect and
shape popular opinion through symbol and allegory9 (Figure 1).
While the lesson of social disruption these prints seek to impart transcends this one event, the
particular circumstances of this earthquake were well-suited to such a framing. As Smits has
documented, the Edo earthquake did not disproportionately affect the economic or socially
7
These prints have been discussed in detail by Cornelius Ouwenhand and more recently Gregory Smits,
among others. See for example Ouwenhand 1964; Smits 2006 and 2013; Markus 1997; Hidemi 2006;
Bates 2007; Noboru and Mamoru 1995; and Kitahara 1995.
8
Smits 2013, 176.
9
Most scholars have agreed with Smits’ position that the catfish prints likely reflect “the standpoint of ordin-
ary people.” They more precisely constitute our principal window into the earthquake’s reception among
Edo’s creative class, who experienced the event themselves and naturally sought to give it popular
expression. Smits 2006, 1045–1046.
360 G. Clancey
Figure 1. Catfish print (namazu-e), 1855. The catfish, representing the

earthquake, is depicted here in the form of a whale, with gold coins spout-
ing from his blow-hole. Some inhabitants of Edo welcome him from the
shore (artist unknown).
Source: http://pinktentacle.com/2011/04/namazu-e-earthquake-catfish-prints/.
vulnerable. Edo’s warrior elite were equally prominent among its dead and displaced. The quality
of the soil beneath one’s house or building rather than one’s social class or status sorted the safe
from the endangered. Hence some neighbourhoods of daimyo (feudal lords) suffered as much or
more damage as those of commoners. The reality of collapsed daimyo mansions, combined with
the economic boost related to rebuilding, and the relatively low death toll (no more than 10,000
out of Edo’s population of one million, or about one percent by Smit’s estimate) caused some to
declare the earthquake the beginning of yonaoshi (world rectification), a state in which the cosmic
order was rebalanced in favour of the previously weak.10
10
Smits 2013, 87–89, 104, 161–163.
Largely missing in the catfish prints is a contemporary sense of tragedy, or even horror. A taste
for horror and the macabre was certainly present in Tokugawa Japan, and the dead do appear in
other genres of post-Ansei woodblocks in the familiar Japanese form of ghosts.11 But the catfish
prints are mostly about the survivors and irony rules the day. At once politically wise and multi-
targeted, they focus on conditions which are certainly present in many modern disaster zones but
rarely discussed, at least in mass media accounts: the way that natural disaster re-sorts society into
winners and losers, and the way that a community copes with its own destruction through black
humor. There was certainly sober grief and mourning among Edo’s survivors, yet this was not
given prominent reflection in the popular narratives which appeared in the wake of the event. Sur-
veying an even broader cache of graphic and written materials from post-earthquake Edo, Alan
Markus observes that “it would be impossible to enumerate … all the jokebooks, lampoons,
comic kyoka and haikai verses, parodical twistings of classic poems, riddles, and rakugo (humor-
ous) monologues inspired by the disaster.” He ascribes this to the need, among others, to “reduce
the tremendous and inexplicable to the realm of the conventional” while at the same time feeding
the instinct to “[highlight] the absurdities of a world turned upside down.”12 Offensive if not taboo
by later standards, such cultural expressions were apparently taken in stride by an Edo population
well-attuned to the ironic and the grotesque, yet not lacking a sense of righteousness. Stories also
circulated of people punished or saved, sometimes through twists of fate, but in many instances
through divine intervention.13
Relief of victims was not absent in the disaster zone, but neither was it of great interest to those
constructing popular narratives. The city government provided direct assistance to the displaced
survivors in the form of free rice, and no recorded rioting or serious disorder occurred following
the earthquake. This was not the first incidence of local Japanese authorities protecting survivors.
The Shogun himself did not figure prominently as a figure providing relief, however, except to
certain daimyo. This suggests that while the habit and the mechanism of post-disaster relief
was present and operative, its role in the popular narrative of this earthquake was far less impor-
tant than it would become in later disasters. While the dead were woven into stories and images,
the figure of the pitiful or needful survivor was largely absent, and the earthquake’s lessons were
too particularistic to coalesce into a new code for social behaviour. Ansei Edo was among the last
Japanese earthquakes when this would be true.14
The Nobi Plain, 1891

Japan was not visited by another “great earthquake” for thirty-five years, and this next one rolled
across a landscape in the midst of radical transformation. The Great Nobi (or Mino-Owari) earth-
quake of 1891 was the first seismic test of the new Imperial nation-state, then criss-crossing itself
with railroads, iron bridges, and telegraph lines. And it resulted in a very different set of percep-
tions of victimhood. On the Nobi Plain the modern category of disaster victim began to recogniz-
ably emerge in a Japanese context.
The numbers of deaths in the Ansei (10,000) and Nobi quakes (7000) were roughly the same.
But unlike in 1855, the victims in 1891 were largely farmers and the inhabitants of small towns
and cities some distance from Tokyo (as Edo had been renamed in its new role as Imperial
11
See Weisenfeld 2012, 20–21.
12
Markus 1997, 60.
13
Markus 1997. The “double role” of victim and post-disaster job-seeker is clearly operative in many disaster
zones. For a contemporary account from Mumbai, see Parthasarathy 2015.
14
Smits 2013, 127–130.
362 G. Clancey
capital). Osaka and Nagoya were close enough to the epicentre to receive some physical damage
and even casualties, but this was more a rural than urban catastrophe. On the other hand, the Nobi
Plain lay half-way between Tokyo and Osaka, and was thus geographically central, familiar, con-
nective, and relatively prosperous. The earthquake cut communications between Japan’s two
largest cities. The largely rural victims thus came to represent the nation in a way that the even
more numerous victims of a huge tsunami in the distant north of Japan a few years later
(caused by the Meiji-Sanriku Earthquake of 1896, which struck roughly the same area that
would later be destroyed in 2011) would not. Geography and timing, in other words, were as
important as class and status in determining how victims would be portrayed and even relieved.15
New forms of graphic representation also influenced the way this disaster was framed and pre-
sented to the public. The Nobi Plain was the first Japanese disaster zone to be extensively photo-
graphed, and among this cache of images were the first photos of disaster victims. Moreover,
certain of these photos were circulated globally. John Milne’s and W.K. Burton’s The Great
Earthquake of Japan, 1891, was written and published in Yokohama but for a primarily
foreign audience, the authors’ stated aim being to show to northern Europeans how powerful
earthquakes could be. Milne was a British expatriate scientist in the service of the Japanese gov-
ernment, then building the nascent field of seismology from within Japan. Most of the book’s
images are of physical damage, and bereft of people. The power of nature and not human
misery is the major theme, as it would continue to be in almost all subsequent photographic por-
trayals of destructive earthquakes. This was not yet an appeal for foreign aid, but an experiment in
how to portray a natural disaster using photography, and how to interest a foreign audience in the
importance of a natural phenomenon which Milne and his many Japanese collaborators were
building a new science around.16
Nonetheless, the book included photos of people left devastated and homeless at a time when
such photos were still rarely taken or seen in Europe and North America, let alone in Asia. The
book documents human misery in the form of Japanese farm families sifting through ruins and
huddling outside makeshift shelters. In most of these photos the victims’ faces are not shown,
the photographer preferring to view them from the back in what appear to be candid postures.
In only one shot are they clearly posing for the camera, arranged on the top of the ruins of
houses and looking directly into the camera lens. This is one of the earliest examples of what
would become a standard post-disaster photograph: the victims standing in the ruins and cooperat-
ing with the cameraman to display what they have lost (Figures 2 and 3).
Japanese themselves consumed this earthquake less in the form of photographs and more as
coloured woodblock broadsheets (a form reminiscent of the catfish prints of thirty-five years
before) or black and white lithographs in thin, cheap, and quickly produced books.17 Unlike
the Edo catfish prints, however, the emphasis was now on purported realism rather than allegory,
and the image of the catfish was largely banished. These broadsheets (kawaraban) also added one
important element missing both from the catfish prints and Milne’s and Burton’s pictures: scenes
of terror. Peasants huddling on the Nobi plain in Milnes’ and Burtons’ photographs were meant to
be pitied at a distance. But the figures in the Japanese woodblock prints hurtling out of casement
windows, about to be crushed by falling bricks, or lying dead around an overturned locomotive
15
For a more detailed description and analysis of the Nobi earthquake (from which this section is largely
taken) see Chap. 5, 113–150 of Clancey 2006a.
16
Milne and Burton 1892.
17
Book titles include Ishihara Ken 1891, Nobi sanjo jishin jikki (Factual Record of the Miserable Nobi Earth-
quake); Suzuki Sakujiro 1891, Aichi gifu daijishin no sanjo (The Aichi-Gifu Great Earthquake’s Miserable
Spectacle); and Mayawaki Hikozaburo 1891, Daijishin jichi kenbunroku (On-the-spot Record of Great
Earthquake Experiences).
Figure 2. Photographs of survivors of the Nobi Earthquake, 1891. Re-

printed from John Milne and W.K. Burton, The Great Earthquake in
Japan, 1891. Yokohama: Lane, Crawford, & Company, 1892.
Figure 3. Photographs of survivors of the Nobi Earthquake, 1891. Re-

printed from John Milne and W.K. Burton, The Great Earthquake in
Japan, 1891. Yokohama: Lane, Crawford, & Company, 1892.
are, potentially at least, the viewer. Although Nagoya was left relatively unharmed by the earth-
quake, and no trains were overturned, Tokyo-based graphic artists portrayed fictional urban
victims in the throes of death with all the melodrama of later disaster films or comics. This was
not the misery of survival, but the trauma of immanent doom. Although illustrations of victims in
their death throes had precedent in earlier Japanese disaster graphics, the urban settings full of
western-style architecture of the post-Nobi prints allowed artists greater imaginative range.18
18
Clancey 2006a, 120–128.
364 G. Clancey
Portrayed either through photography or prints, images of people losing their lives, or having
lost everything else, were relatively novel in in this quantity and detail. But there was still a dis-
tance in comparison with the Ansei Edo material. The Nobi images, as well as written passages in
newspapers and books meant to evoke similar effects, were created mostly by people who had not
experienced the earthquake themselves, including reporters, writers, artists, and even scientists
who had rushed to the disaster zone from Tokyo or in some instances had likely stayed where
they were and creatively channelled or embellished reports they received from the countryside.
The Edo woodblock artists of thirty-five years before had experienced the earthquake themselves,
and had a direct stake in how society around them was reconstituted in the aftermath. They were
in that sense also victims. In 1891, however, those narrating the disaster were not its victims, yet
were eager to extend their imaginations in reliving what they assumed was a common collective
experience of terror and misery. The figure of “the earthquake victim” was thus encountered at a
distance, and being distant, was necessarily flat or vague. He or she was, as the same time, a
magnet for free-floating empathy.19
The woodblock prints generated by Nobi are thus utterly different in form and content than the
catfish prints of thirty-five years before in their focus on the generality of suffering. Absent is any
sense of the victims’ social or class differences. There are no winners, only losers. No ironic
insights are presented into the human condition.20 Nobi was in that sense both a modern and a
national earthquake. The modern Japanese nation-state was portrayed as under attack and
responding with unity and empathy. This was in keeping with the victims’ new identity as imper-
ial subjects. It was even considered appropriate for some accounts to portray the Emperor “shed-
ding real tears” for their suffering, and opening his coffers to provide relief.21 The rural victims, in
turn, were expected to accept such empathy with humility and grace. This is the theme of one
book by two Nagoya city officials, which included an illustration of a delegation of moustachioed
and uniformed imperial representatives being greeted by the inhabitants of a broken village. The
headman receives them while mice-like villagers huddle low on all fours amidst the wreckage of
their homes. In the subsequent history of disaster-zone imagery there would be many such por-
trayals of the powerful coming to help the devastated, with contrasts starkly drawn. But it
would have been unimaginable to a Japanese woodblock artist at the time of Ansei Edo earth-
quake to illustrate such a scene of subservience bereft of irony or social commentary22 (Figure 4).
As I have discussed elsewhere, other elements of the woodblock prints produced after Nobi can be
read as political commentaries on the new regime, especially their concentration on the failure of
western-style infrastructure compared with the seeming survival of indigenous examples. This
reflected long-standing debates in Tokyo about the rapidity and wisdom of Japan’s re-landscaping,
and the country’s relation to western knowledge and power. But the farmer-victims on the Nobi
Plain were external to these political debates in ways that the urban victims of Ansei had not been.
Nobi’s rural victims appear in prints mainly as the recipients of aid from uniformed army officers
and other officials of the new Meiji state. The victims are not shown petitioning for relief, as rural
villages had traditionally done after famines or floods, but as being proactively helped. In some
prints survivors are shown being rescued, given tents, and otherwise assisted by the new Japanese
army, the first time that this warrior society would depict its soldiers in this beneficent role.23
19
Clancey 2006a, 120–139.
20
Clancey 2006a, 131.
21
Clancey 2006a.
22
Clancey 2006a, 132–133. The image is from Kizawa and Yoshihiko 1891. The authors were Nagoya city
officials, who at one point in the text chastise their readers for insufficiently celebrating the Emperor’s ben-
evolence to victims.
23
Clancey 2006a. For a condensed version of this argument, see also Clancey 2006b.
Figure 4. An imperial delegation visits a devastated village in the disaster zone, Nobi Plain, 1891.
Reprinted from Noritoshi Kizawa and Yamawa Yoshihiko, Meiji Shinsai Shuroku. Tokyo, 1891.
The theme of relief – how generous the nation was to the survivors – now became an impor-
tant part of the post-disaster narrative. A massive amount of aid donated by empathetic citizens
was reported in newspapers whose editors raised additional money directly from their readers.
This was also the first Japanese disaster in which a proto-NGO was mobilized, in the form of
the Red Cross. The Japanese Red Cross was at the time more an aristocratic ladies club than
the efficient aid agency it would become, but it did bring a slightly international flavour to the
relief effort. Some foreign funds were also raised and celebrated in newspaper accounts. Here
in some respects was continuity with the Edo-period image of gold coins raining down upon sur-
vivors, though now absent any sense that this largesse would bring enrichment, prosperity, or
social and political rectification, only a restoration of a victim’s former humble life. How the
funds were actually distributed or whether they re-ordered local societies in the disaster zone
was largely beyond the interest of contemporary commentators, and is thus also lost to the
event’s historians.24
Tokyo, 1923
Japan was struck by other significant earthquakes and tsunamis later in the Meiji (1868–1912) and
Taisho (1912–1926) periods, but none equal in power or effect to The Great Kanto Earthquake of
1923, which killed 100,000 or more inhabitants of Tokyo and Yokohama. Unlike the Nobi event
of thirty-two years before, those affected were not remote farm-folk, but inhabitants of the
24
Clancey 2006a.
366 G. Clancey
Imperial capital. And compared to the Ansei Edo disaster, there were many more dead, trauma-
tized, and homeless survivors. Victimhood in this disaster was thus again subject to new and
different framings.
One new element was the wide-ranging discussion in the aftermath of the catastrophe of
tenken ron, or “retribution theory.” Advanced most strongly by right-wing elements inspired
by Nichiren Buddhism and State Shinto, but also by a surprising number of mainstream
writers and political figures, this theory held that Tokyo’s materialism, westernization, or the pres-
ence of communists (emphases varied) had incurred the wrath of heaven, and the solution was
Emperor-centred self-strengthening. This was the equivalent of blaming the victims for bringing
the disaster upon themselves. Japan was just then entering a period of governance by political
parties and all manner of progressive reforms, and the reconstruction of the capital would in
some sense advance many of the trends that right-wing elements despised. In the long run,
however, these reactionary victim-blaming voices, first critically amplified in the disaster zone
of the 1920s, would become politically dominant. Together with the Japanese military, whose
star also rose with the declaration of martial law in the aftermath of the disaster, they would
lead Japan to even greater physical destruction in the 1940s.25
Victim blaming had been present but rarely dominant in the framings of previous large Japa-
nese earthquakes. Such moralizing was a minor trope in the Ansei Edo narrative, mainly in stories
about particular individuals. The makers of catfish prints were more ironic in their approach to
cosmic forces, and the phenomenon of yonaoshi was more hopeful than accusatory. Blaming
or moralizing about victims was almost entirely absent in the aftermath of Nobi. But circum-
stances in 1923 were different, starting with the location and scale of the death and destruction.
Then too, most of the dead and homeless on the Kanto plain were from the urban working class,
which created a different disaster demographic than in 1855, when aristocratic neighbourhoods
and the more expensive pleasure quarters had been hit particularly hard. Fears of working
class radicalism and conservative distaste with growing consumerism likely contributed to the
rhetoric of retribution. The earthquake created an opportunity for conservative forces to teach
moral and political lessons to the traumatized survivors. The Ministry of Education also commis-
sioned and published books for children extoling heroes whose exemplary behaviour in the crisis
added to the sorting of victims according to virtue. The class critiques of the Ansei Edo catfish
prints or the all-encompassing empathy wrapped around the Nobi victims would have been dis-
cordant in this new disaster zone. The dominant narrative now became deep self-reflection leading
to personal and national self-strengthening.26
Terror, which had been given visual and textual expression in Nobi, was taken to a new
dimension in the imagery of Kanto. One new element in the Great Kanto Earthquake was the ubi-
quity of images of bodies of the dead. Mounds of the dead piled up like cord-wood and heaps of
human ashes were photographed, published in newspapers, and mass-produced in the form of
postcards. This was a numbing chronicle of mass death characteristic of battlefields, but utterly
uncharacteristic of previous Japanese narratives or framings of natural disaster, or even of battle-
field depictions of the Russo-Japanese War.27
Postcard photographers also portrayed survivors as a great mass of internal refugees gathered
on the platforms of train stations or crowded into train cars, in a rush to return to their ancestral
25
This paragraph summarizes arguments made in detail in Orihara and Clancey 2012; and in Schencking
2013, 118–143; see also Schencking 2009.
26
Hammer 2006; Schencking 2013; Borland 2006; Borland 2005.
27
For a detailed discussion of this and other types and genres of images depicting the Kanto Earthquake see
Weisenfeld 2012; Schencking 2013, 97–98.
Figure 5. Postcard photograph of trains filled with survivors evacuating

Tokyo, 1923. Author unknown. Source: http://www.greatkantoearthquake.
com/dead_gallery.html.
Figure 6. Corpses of the dead, 1923. Author unknown.

Source: http://www.greatkantoearthquake.com/dead_gallery.html.
villages. These were also evocative of images of civilian refugees of past (and future) wars, but
novel in the Japanese experience. The disaster victim as internal refugee, an increasingly common
twentieth and twenty-first century figure, thus first became visible in the Japanese context in post-
earthquake Tokyo28 (Figures 5 and 6).
28
Weisenfeld 2012, 126–127.
368 G. Clancey
One horror that was not given visual expression, and whose memory was suppressed in the
aftermath, was the mob killings of Koreans in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and
fire. This murder of victims by other victims was without precedent following Japanese cata-
strophes, and could not be fashioned into any productive or reasonable narrative, though it
almost certainly contributed to the government’s decision to declare martial law. As discussed
below, this would not be the last time that the boundary between victim and victimizer blurred
after a Japanese disaster, although never again in so brutal a manner.29
The new attention given the dead as well as the living was of course also conditioned by
their sheer numbers, their identity as inhabitants of the Imperial capital, and the particular
manner in which most died – victims of fire rather than falling buildings. The peculiarity of
the tornado-like firestorm which in a matter of minutes killed over 40,000 people crammed
into a large clearing (the site of the former Army Clothing Depot) was newly horrific in the
long Japanese experience of disaster, yet eerily prescient of what would happen just two
decades later all over urban Japan during American air attacks. Horror and scale likely ren-
dered taboo ironic commentary, while playing into the hands of those calling for self-
inspection and conservative political reform. While the Ansei Edo disaster rendered vic-
timhood ambiguous, and Nobi made it the object of national concern and empathy,
Kanto made it so vast and atrocious as to demand a redemptive response rather than a
return to any prior state.
One new class of earthquake victim which emerges in this disaster, if only slightly, are
animals. Some prints and newspaper photos depict horses and even an elephant stampeding
to escape the flames among the human multitude. Whether the artists’ intent was to raise
deeper wells of empathy given the animals’ even greater confusion and helplessness, or to
suggest even greater horror and social breakdown by having large mammals running
scared amongst already doomed crowds of human victims, the effect is new and mesmerizing,
and would presage many more depictions of animal victimhood in subsequent disasters.30
(Figure 7).
Kobe, 1995
It was not until 1995 that Japan experienced another seismic event categorized as a “great
earthquake disaster” (daishinsai), this time at the industrial port of Kobe. And this Japan
was a very different place than the fragile parliamentary democracy of 1923, the newly
modernizing imperial state of 1891, or the soon-to-be overthrown shogunate of 1855.
The Japan of the “Great Hanshin Earthquake,” as this event came to be called, was a
secular welfare state with a large middle class whose members, more than previous gener-
ations, expected to be protected from natural disaster by state-supported scientific and tech-
nical expertise. That the Great Hanshin Earthquake was not predicted by seismologists, and
caused even highly engineered structures like the Hanshin Expressway to collapse, led to
widespread public consternation. Even more galling, however, was the failure of the
national and regional governments to quickly respond to the crisis and properly care for
victims in the days and weeks that followed. Indeed, local yakuza (Japanese crime families)
were able to exploit this vacuum by opening food stations for the survivors. Failure of
29
Weisenfeld 2012, 167–178.
30
Schencking 2013, 95. An escaped circus elephant among a crowd of fleeing people was illustrated in at
least two famous coloured lithographs depicting fire overtaking the Hanayashiki Circus and Asakusa Park
(one example is illustrated in Holmberg 2012).
Figure 7. Panicked horses and oxen, Great Kanto Earthquake and fire, 1923
woodblock by Hamada Nyosen.
Source: http://allmyeyes.blogspot.sg/2011/03/japans-devastating-earthquake-
1923.html.
government and expertise on all levels would thus become one of the dominant narratives of
the disaster.
The short-comings of state planning had formed an under-current in the aftermath of the Nobi
Earthquake, given the collapse of so much newly built modern infrastructure. This failure was in
fact exaggerated for effect by woodblock artists. But such criticism had been balanced by the gov-
ernment’s perceived largesse toward victims. In Kobe, however, the modern state’s opportunity to
act as hero or savoir was largely lost in the rubble.31 Despite the welfare provisions of the post-
war Japanese state, such as universal health insurance, Kobe exposed the reality that “disaster
victim” was not a category of persons earmarked for direct state aid, beyond temporary shelter
and feeding. As David Edgington points out, during the rebuilding process, “no direct financial
support for individual survivors was offered” under the principal that “all Japan people should
be treated equally in the provision of government services and support.”32 Even in reconstruction
and recovery, then, the state could not adopt the mantel of hero, as it had in the case of earlier
earthquakes such as Nobi and Kanto. Following the Great Kanto Earthquake, for example, the
government had founded a re-housing agency (the Dojunkai) which provided a limited amount
of state-constructed housing for survivors. Although its accomplishments were wholly inadequate
(only 12,000 units had been built by the time the bureau was closed in 1941), this very modest
effort earned the government of the time some credit. In contrast to this, the arguably more sub-
stantial efforts of the state in 1995 to provide temporary shelter earned officialdom only public
censure.33
The humble but grateful victim of the Great Nobi Earthquake and the blameworthy and self-
reflective victim of the Great Kanto Earthquake were replaced in 1995 by a new type of citizen-
31
Avenell 2013; Edgington 2010, 51–52.
32
Edgington 2010, 86.
33
Edgington 2010, 55–72.
370 G. Clancey
victim who expected relief, and, when it did not come in adequate forms, called for bottom-up
political reform. There was no “blaming the victim” in this disaster narrative, but rather anger
toward politicians and bureaucrats. Farther along in the recovery process, Kobe victims, aided
by volunteers from outside Kobe, would become national models for grassroots political
action. By the 1990s Japan already had a large NGO sector and many organizations supported
by volunteers. But Kobe would be regarded in hindsight as having given birth to a new spirit
of voluntarism affecting the whole archipelago. Failure of victim relief on the part of the govern-
ment would thus turn some victims into activists, and open a new space for creative and partici-
patory community building and planning that had not existed before the earthquake struck. So
went a new (and ultimately long-lived) narrative in the aftermath of Kobe. Here was arguably
an updated version of world rectification, delivered not through a transfer of wealth so much
as of political capital.34
A special category of “angry victim” was the wives who deluged the Hyogo Prefecture
Woman’s Center with calls asking for advice on divorcing their husbands. In the moment of
crisis, it was reported that some husbands had chosen to save themselves, their dogs, or even
their golf clubs rather than look out for their families, a narrative that seemed to expose with
razor-sharpness the long-standing alienation of Japanese salarymen from home life. That many
men prioritized service to their companies over their families in the days and weeks following
the earthquake only rendered that gulf more visible. This critique was arguably a latter-day reflec-
tion (though admittedly a highly focused one) of the tendency toward social self-inspection that
had arisen following the Great Kanto Earthquake.35
In addition to “angry victim,” the Kobe disaster spurred the emergence of other new cat-
egories, most prominently the elderly. Victimhood in previous great earthquakes had never
been given an age; in fact the young and otherwise healthy were most often featured as
victims in retrospective stories of death and survival, perhaps in order to highlight tragedy by
referencing premature death. The prominence of elderly victims in Kobe (over fifty-six percent
of the immediate casualties in Hyogo prefecture were aged sixty or over, as were ninety
percent of those who died of earthquake-related injuries) highlighted Japan’s current demographic
crisis, in which the elderly were not only more numerous as a percentage of the population, but
were often living alone in substandard housing in older urban neighbourhoods. Indeed, a World
Health Organization report referred to Kobe as the “first aged society earthquake in the world.”36
A third new category of victim was pets. Pets entered the popular consciousness as a class of
survivors deserving of rescue and care, not just for their own sake, but for that of their traumatized
owners. Japanese pet ownership had increased exponentially since the Great Kanto Earthquake,
and the dilemma of whether to leave one’s house right way or attempt to rescue a pet was new for
many Japanese, including older people who lived alone with animals as their only companions.
As in the case of food kitchens and other relief activities, NGOs stepped into the role of animal
rescuers. The Japan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals established a Tokyo head-
quarters within days of the disaster, marshalling eleven groups from various parts of Japan to
assist other animal-oriented NGOs in Kobe. Within a month after the disaster, an Animal
Rescue Center had been established in Kobe, leading an effort that would eventually involve
over 21,000 volunteers rescuing and caring for over 1500 animals.37 Local shelters also made
34
Özerdem and Jacoby 2005; Avenell 2013; Tanaka 2000, 185–196; Imada 2003.
35
Jameson 1995. Despite such reported family tensions, the number of divorces in Kobe actually decreased
in the year following the earthquake, likely because the sense of vulnerability overcame the sudden loss of
trust.
36
WHO 2013, 4; Edgington 2010, 8.
37
Executive Committee of the Memorial Project for Suffered Animals 1998.
provision for people with pets, often setting aside a separate room or constructing kennels to
house pets until their owners could find more permanent shelter. This would set a precedent
for the care of both pets and pet owners that has been followed in subsequent Japanese disasters
of all types.
While the victimhood of elderly people and pets was well-recognized, certain other victimi-
zation narratives in Kobe were suppressed. Reiko Masai has written of meetings called after
reports of rape and other violence against women in the disaster zone, culminating in a march
in central Kobe involving nearly 100 women. The aftermath of this public protest was in
Masai’s words “extreme bashing” by the press. She wrote:
At that time the mass media mostly reported heart-warming stories and encouraging news toward
reconstruction. It circulated the image that people in the devastated areas were all innocent and strug-
gling hard with their hardship.38
In suggesting that some victims could also be victimizers, Masai and her colleagues had violated
an unspoken rule laid down as early as 1891 about extending an undifferentiated empathy to sur-
vivors within the disaster zone by those outside, and disallowing the ironic and particularizing
stance of Ansei’s social commentators. Even laying the blame on “the people of Tokyo” for
the 1923 disaster was to task the survivors with exemplary and redemptive behaviour while for-
getting the hunting down of Koreans. Indeed, as Charles Schencking has pointed out, the charge
that materialism and luxury had supposedly brought divine punishment on Taisho Tokyo was
largely laid at the feet of women.39
Sanriku and Fukushima, 2011

In the twenty-first century, the catalogue of images portraying disaster victims is now so huge,
varied, and accessible that it defies easy archiving, let alone narrativizing. When a tsunami dev-
astated the Sanriku coast of northern Japan in 2011, the spectre of death by natural disaster was
filmed, broadcast, emailed, and tweeted around the world in real time and in unprecedented detail.
As mentioned above, a tsunami of similar power had struck the same area in 1896, causing an
even greater number of deaths (approximately 22,000, compared to about 18,000 in 2011) but
with almost no effect on world consciousness, so remote was the region and its victims even
from Tokyo. But what became known as the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 was not just
a global event, it was a global media experience. Moreover, this was a compound disaster, the
tsunami triggering the meltdown of a nuclear plant reactor, and thus adding radioactive contami-
nation and the resulting mass evacuation of over 100,000 people to the historic list of horrors and
burdens inherent in Japan’s seismicity.40
No Japanese natural disaster has been better documented than the Sanriku tsunami, including
the plight of its victims, some of whom provided first-person narratives through social media. But
some elements common in past portrayals of disaster victimhood had fallen away or been rejected
by 2011. Largely absent (at lease in mass-circulation media) were images of dead bodies such as
those mass-produced as postcards in 1923. Likewise, there has been little reference to winners and
38
Masai 2005.
39
Schencking 2013, 126–134, 243–250.
40
The literature on this latest disaster is particularly voluminous, but among the sources I have relied on for
this section are Samuels 2013; Kingston 2011; Eiji 2011; and Hindmarsh 2013. This section is also informed
on my interaction with key players the medical response to the Fukushima accident as a consultant to the
Division of Human Health of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since 2012.
372 G. Clancey
losers living side by side in post-disaster landscapes, at least in mass-audience news reports, either
inside or outside Japan. The unspoken rule that the victims in the disaster zone are to be treated
with all-encompassing if generalized empathy, established as early as 1891 on the Nobi Plain, still
stands in the age of global disaster news coverage. In the immediate aftermath of 3.11 (a Japanese
shorthand that references an earlier globally broadcast disaster) the controversially outspoken
governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro, briefly tried to revive the narrative, common after the
Great Kanto Earthquake, that Japanese were responsible for bringing disaster upon themselves.
The earthquake was “divine punishment,” Ishihara exclaimed, for Japanese greed, a condition
which he hoped the tsunami would “wash away.” But the contrast between Ishihara’s statement
and the identity of the victims (mostly fisher-folk and elderly people living in a remote and rela-
tively poor part of Japan) ensured that, unlike in 1923, this claim received little echo, and was
indeed widely condemned before being retracted.41
Victimhood in this latest disaster has been more complex than any one narrative could hope to
encompass or explain. Even the political uses of victimhood, which had been rather quick to
coalesce in previous earthquakes, remained ambiguous long after this one.42 An obvious dividing
line separates those who directly experienced the tsunami and those who were evacuated from the
area around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Natural disaster victim and nuclear acci-
dent victim were early on sorted by the government and news media into different categories and
treated in different ways. Indeed, “Sanriku” (the area devastated by the tsunami) and “Fukushima”
(the site of the nuclear accident) have become labels for two geographies, two incidents, and two
sets of victim-survivors.
The tsunami victims are bound by geography and time. The physical part of their ordeal – the
horror of the wave and the destruction of their loved ones and homes – is over. Now is the period
of grief and rebuilding. The evacuees from the irradiated zone, however, cannot engage in rebuild-
ing because they cannot, with a few exceptions, return home. These nuclear victims of Fukushima
thus constitute a new and tragic category in the history of Japanese disaster. Unlike the survivors
of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, they have been told, with few exceptions, that they did
not receive significant enough exposure to radiation to experience adverse health effects. On the
other hand, they are enrolled in a program to monitor their health for the rest of their lives, based
upon the model of hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors. This creates a gnawing uncertainty
about the future, which mirrors their status as internal refugees. While the survivors of the
atomic bombings began to return and rebuild their cities after 1945 in ignorance of the full
effects of radiation, better knowledge of its dangers keeps the Fukushima evacuees widely scat-
tered and unable to return.43
The tsunami survivors and nuclear accident evacuees were the most direct victims of the
earthquake. But the event was new in also creating a larger category of what might be called
“vicarious victims.” Many people as far away as Tokyo and beyond believe that they too
might have been irradiated, causing widespread fear, leading in some cases to the development
of psychological problems, and in others to political activism. While there is controversy as to
whether dangerous levels of radiation spread that far, its invisibility and the fact that the
leakage of contaminated water at Fukushima has yet to be fully contained has kept the matter
alive in the public mind. Lack of trust in the Japanese government, in physicians advising the gov-
ernment, and especially in the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company which
41
Victoria 2013, 59.
42
Samuels 2013.
43
One framework for understanding the complicated victimhood of nuclear accident evacuees, a class of
persons who of course pre-date Fukushima, is presented in Erikson 1994.
owns the plant and is tasked with containing the damage, has helped to create a sense of
unbounded victimhood.44
The most controversial victimhood of all is that of TEPCO workers who stayed behind or
were later brought in to contain the nuclear accident. Were they heroes and protectors, or villains
and perpetrators? Those who wish to portray them as heroes coined the term “the Fukushima
fifty,” though there were actually many hundreds of workers who cycled in and out of the danger-
ous post-tsunami plant site, many of whom were temporary workers, not long-term TEPCO
employees.45 For others, these workers fit the role of villain. Their association with TEPCO,
rather than their commitment to help after the fact at the expense of their own health, was
what defined them in the eyes of some anti-nuclear activists and evacuees. While radiation was
a real and present danger for these workers, ultimately their more direct and diagnosable victim-
hood was psychological, including high levels of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), exacer-
bated by discrimination from other victims.46
The elderly, who had emerged as a distinct category of victim in Kobe, were even more pro-
minent on the rolls of the dead and injured in Sanriku. The communities hit by the tsunami had
already lost so many young people as to put into question their long-term viability were they to be
reconstructed. Yet the framing of this event as a national disaster taking place over a large area and
with many victims, sometimes rendered the elderly less visible in media depictions of victimhood
than they were in the statistics. There was one class of victims, replete with elderly people, who
were particularly invisible: the evacuees from the hospitals and nursing homes around the
Fukushima plant, more than fifty of whom died in buses and in temporary shelters just after
the evacuation because of the stress of removal or the absence of medication and proper care
at their destinations. The mortality rate for institutionalized elderly evacuees indeed more than
doubled in the two months following the disaster. The narrative that the evacuation had saved
lives, while undoubtedly true, could not easily accommodate the reality that it had also killed
people, and was in fact far more lethal an element in this disaster than radiation poisoning,
which to date has claimed not a single documented victim.47
Conversely, children emerged for the first time in a Japanese earthquake as a principal cat-
egory of victim, given their greater vulnerability to radiation poisoning. Images of young children
being screened for potential cancers were highly disturbing not only to those in the disaster zone
but to the Japanese public at large, even though the resulting physicians’ reports provided little
evidence of a widespread health crisis. Distrust of physicians, and especially radiation specialists,
in the wake of the disaster mainly revolved around the question, “Have our children been poi-
soned?” and no amount of official reassurance has put the matter to rest. The Japanese govern-
ment’s chosen remedy for calming the nerves of evacuees – to institute a life-long health
screening process on the model of atomic bombing survivors – potentially has exacerbated
anxiety rather than quelled it, as it redefines survivors as life-long patients and research subjects.
It was the consensus among medical professionals in the years immediately after the disaster that
psychological problems, many due to uncertainties about radiation and its effects, were a larger
public health issue than radiation itself. The fact that some evacuees were even subjected to bully-
ing and exclusion by other Japanese who viewed them as “contaminated” has only added to this
44
Elliott 2013.
45
According to one German source, the phrase was coined by foreign media, and then imported back into the
Japanese news stream. The number fifty referred to the first batch of workers who stayed behind, though they
were quickly supplemented by others. Hetkämper 2011.
46
Reuters Health Medical News 2012.
47
Yasumura 2014; Kondo 2014.
374 G. Clancey
record of misery. This situation is somewhat akin to earlier discrimination against survivors of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.48
As we have seen, animals had emerged as a category of victim worthy of rescue following the
Great Hanshin Earthquake. In the intervening years the issue of animal rescue became prominent
internationally in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2008), with some human
deaths blamed on the failure of evacuation personnel to accommodate companion animals, thus indu-
cing some at-risk residents to stay behind with their pets. The United States Congress passed legis-
lation in the aftermath of that disaster requiring that provision be made to allow pets to be evacuated
with their owners in case of a similar disaster. Similar legislation had been passed in many Japanese
prefectures in the intervening years, but the new protocols were slow to be accepted on the ground.49
Many shelters in the tsunami-affected zone still did not accommodate pets, which meant that some
pet owners remained in unsafe houses rather than evacuate to shelters.50
Building on efforts begun in Kobe, NGOs such as the Japan Cat Network, Animal Friends
Niigata, Arkbark, and others cooperated to form Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and
Support (JEARS), which has used social media to gather volunteers and raise donations from
around the world. Like the differences in conditions between the tsunami survivors and the
nuclear evacuees, however, animal victimhood in the two disaster zones differed in type and
tone. While it was still possible to find and rescue surviving animals in tsunami-affected areas,
it was illegal to enter the nuclear plant evacuation zone to do so, although some pet owners
and activists nonetheless took the risk. One man, Naoto Matsumura, opted to illegally remain
in his home in the exclusion zone despite the near-certainty of damage to his health, expressly
in order to care for the numerous animals left behind. This included livestock as well as pets,
all of which had been left to starve in the haste to evacuate the human population. Matsumura’s
selflessness earned him the title in the global press of “The Guardian of Fukushima’s Animals,”
and an English-language Facebook page set up for him by admirers had as of October 2015 eli-
cited over 37,000 “likes” while serving as a conduit for donations.51
Matsumura shares with his evacuated townsmen, and the many survivors of the tsunami, a
sense of rage. The ideal of the “humble, grateful” survivor and aid-recipient caricatured after
the Great Nobi Earthquake was hardly present in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earth-
quake. Even though Japanese emergency managers had learned lessons from Kobe, the failures
in relief were still significant enough, and social media now powerful enough, that anger, resent-
ment, and blame were general and free-floating. And unlike in the case of Kobe, no yonaoshi nar-
rative could paper over the real suffering and existential loss, given the scale and depth of this
latest disaster.
Conclusion
I have argued that collective portrayals and understandings of victimhood, even within the con-
fines of one disaster type in one country, differ markedly over time and circumstances. Indeed,
48
Aoki 2013.
49
Anonymous (Alive News) 2011. This web-page quotes section nine of the “Fukushima Prefecture Animal
Care and Management Promotion Plan” (March 2008), which called for the “rescue, care, and feeding” of
animals in the case of natural disasters. This and similar prefectural plans reported on the same page rep-
resented a significant change in the attitudes of disaster planners although evidence indicates that such pol-
icies were often ignored by officials on the ground, most notably in the evacuation of the area around the
nuclear power plant.
50
Welsh 2011.
51
Naoto Matsumura, ca. 2012; Milner 2012.
destructive earthquakes (and all other large disasters) roil and re-order specific social and political
landscapes, exposing weaknesses, amplifying tensions, and re-sorting groups in less than predict-
able ways. Just as it is wrong to imagine an ahistorical or cumulative experience of victimhood in
which a predetermined group inevitably suffers more, so too the very role of the victim – its
meaning, relevance, and texture – is malleable, and subject to redefinition with each new cata-
strophe. I have only touched on the many nuances disaster has brought to this role, which deserves
greater research and commentary across a broader range of events and time periods. Only then
will we be able to construct generalizations which in their empirical fullness can replace the ahis-
torical and acultural ones we too easily settle on, such as the supposed timeless stoicism of “the
Japanese” in the face of natural disaster.
The record of Japan’s great earthquakes suggests that new social and political categories
emerge as the direct result of a sudden-onset disaster and that nature in the form of seismicity
can be an active agent in shaping social and political outcomes. At the same time, categories
of victimhood are defined not just by the trembling of the earth and the collapse or combustion
of houses and cities, but by social, political, and media-related decisions made amidst the
ruins. In some cases these may have followed pre-existing tropes, but more striking in the
instances I have examined was the emergence of new groups, narratives, and images. The survi-
vors of each earthquake were not necessarily borrowing their perceptual frames from previous
ones, even though in some instances the intervals between such events were relatively short, span-
ning a single lifetime. There was rather a tendency to see each event as unique, and to frame
victims in ways that made the most sense in the context of that particular time. This suggests
that memory, which is emerging as an important category in historical discussions of how political
and social events are framed or interpreted, may play a lesser role in sudden-onset disasters like
earthquakes, although more cases need to be analysed to sustain that argument. Missing in my
own narrative, for example, are memories and scars of other intervening events, such as the bomb-
ings of Japanese cities in the Second World War, rice riots, urban fires, and typhoons, all of which
might have influenced perceptions of victimhood more than the record of the last great earth-
quake. Clearly the Fukushima nuclear event is interpretively tied to the nuclear bombings of Hir-
oshima and Nagasaki as much as it is to the Meiji-Sanriku Tsunami of 1896 or even to the Kobe
earthquake two decades earlier.
If there is any historical rhythm that can be generalized from the cases presented here, it has to
do with the broadening of the concept of victimhood in the modern period. If the catfish prints of
1855 accurately reflect the attitude of that time, then victimhood in the modern sense was less
clear or even interesting a category than winner and loser, impoverished and newly enriched.
By 1891, however, a flatter or more general sense of victimhood accompanied the new Japanese
role of Imperial subject, along with a heightened sense of terror that what happened in one place
could happen in another. By 1923, being an Imperial subject could carry with it the responsibility
for actually causing earthquakes, or preventing future ones through self-strengthening. Here was
the generalization, if not simplification, of victimhood taken to an extreme. The depth and
location of the catastrophe – the national capital – were likely crucial in allowing the nation to
be framed as under attack. By the 1990s, however, five decades into the post-war consumer
state, the victims of Kobe were in no mood to be blamed, and the immediate product of the dis-
aster was a spurt of political liberalism and increased voluntarism rather than militarism and
reaction.
The events of 2011 are still unfolding, socially and politically. But perhaps to an even greater
extent than in 1923, a sense of victimhood has settled widely over the Japanese population, even
as that category fragments into an unprecedented variety of possible attributes or roles. The
Sanriku survivors, the Fukushima evacuees, the workers at the TEPCO site, the vicarious
victims in Tokyo and elsewhere, whether feeling empathy or fear, and the non-human actors
376 G. Clancey
from animals to nature itself, are difficult to contain in a single frame. Even a novelist would be
tested. This fragmentation of victimhood is likely what has prevented any one narrative from
taking hold of the post-disaster social and political landscape, as was characteristic after other
great earthquakes. The compound nature of the 2011 disaster is one factor in this scenario, but
another is the rise of social media, which has also kept the disaster more current and thus
ongoing than newspapers or television could have managed.
Lastly, the type and nature of a disaster scenario matter more than the convergent fields of
disaster studies and disaster risk management often recognize. Attempts to homogenize disasters
such as earthquakes, typhoons, fires, or volcanic explosions into a common language or frame of
reference are in one sense understandable, given the common need to save, rescue, recover, and
rehabilitate victims. The difference between human reactions to a sudden-onset event like an
earthquake and a slow-moving one like a typhoon, however, are considerable. Programs that
prepare professional groups to deal with post-disaster scenarios would also do well to include
the unpredictable speciation of victimhood that inevitably accompanies such events. Unpredict-
ability is certainly an attribute of those things we call disasters, yet we often attempt to dissociate
it by imagining prior events to be good guides for future action, the idea of the usable past. Very
large disasters, however, rend the very fabric of reality, and then re-stitch it in new and often
awkward patterns. Victimhood itself is one prominent and zig-zagging strand in that weave.
History serves as the best introduction to its complexities, but does not exhaust its possibilities.
Acknowledgements
A draft of this paper was presented at the “Protecting the Weak: Entangled Processes of Framing, Mobiliz-
ation and Institutionalization” Conference held at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, in January 2014,
with funding provided by the Volkswagen Foundation.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
The project benefited from the financial support of a Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research
Fund Tier 2 grant entitled ‘Governing Compound Disasters in Urbanising Asia’ [MOE2014-T2-1-017].
Notes on contributor
Gregory Clancey is Associate Professor of History and Leader of the Science, Technology, and Society
(STS) Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is
also the Master of Tembusu College at NUS. His book Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese
Seismicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) won the Sidney Edelstein Prize from the Society
for the History of Technology. He is currently Co-PI of a three year grant-funded project on Disaster Gov-
ernance in Asia.
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Critical Asian Studies, 2016

Vol. 48, No. 3, 356–379, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2016.1199374

The Changing Character of Disaster Victimhood: Evidence from Japan’s

ABSTRACT: Japan is periodically wracked by “Great Earthquakes” (daijishin) – seismic

Keywords: earthquakes; disasters; Japan; victims; history

© 2016 BCAS, Inc.

Figure 1. Catﬁsh print (namazu-e), 1855. The catﬁsh, representing the

The Nobi Plain, 1891

Figure 2. Photographs of survivors of the Nobi Earthquake, 1891. Re-

Figure 3. Photographs of survivors of the Nobi Earthquake, 1891. Re-

Figure 5. Postcard photograph of trains ﬁlled with survivors evacuating

Figure 6. Corpses of the dead, 1923. Author unknown.

Sanriku and Fukushima, 2011

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