1923 Great Kantō earthquake

The 1923 Great Kantō earthquake matters both as a historical catastrophe and as a warning that violence against Koreans can return under the cover of a new disaster. In Kido’s reflections, the earthquake’s approaching centenary turns distant history into a present fear: public memory, xenophobia, and the uncertain safety of his family converge around the possibility of another major quake.

Historical memory and the approaching centenary

Watching a television discussion of xenophobia and the massacre of Koreans, Kido recalls that the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake had occurred ninety years earlier. The centenary is still a decade away, but the approaching milestone unsettles him. The interval is not simply a marker of time: it makes him imagine how the violence associated with the earlier disaster might be repeated amid future upheaval.

Kido’s anxiety is intensified by forecasts that a major earthquake in the Nankai Trough and another centered in the Tokyo region are near certainties, even though no one knows when they will strike. In his neighborhood, people worry about collapsing buildings and tsunami damage. He considers the difference between being at home on the ninth floor and being with Sota at the waterfront in Yamashita Park, where they might not have time to escape.

Disaster and the threat of renewed persecution

The possibility of physical devastation leads Kido to a more specific fear: that another earthquake could again expose Koreans in Japan to mob violence. He wonders whether, a century after the earlier disaster, people who take the cry “Death to Koreans!” seriously might come for him and his family, whether in an ostentatious display of mischief or through the release of pent-up resentment. His work as a lawyer, his role as a father, his love of music, and his effort to be a good person would offer no protection; he fears those qualities might even intensify the hatred directed at him.

The thought is bound up with Kido’s uneasy relation to his own background. Having grown up almost entirely as a Japanese person before naturalizing, he struggles to understand whether he should regard himself as a direct victim or perpetuator of the troubles faced by Korean communities. The historical memory of the earthquake and massacre presses on that uncertainty: private identity cannot guarantee safety when hostility treats ancestry as sufficient cause for attack.

The record of violence

Kido’s fear is informed by his reading of historical records. He knows of fifty-three cases involving the murder of Koreans that were documented in prosecutions, and of the Ministry of Justice’s figure of 233 deaths. He also knows that estimates of the actual toll differ and may be several times higher, and that Chinese people were among those killed. The gap between documented cases and estimated deaths gives the history a disturbing incompleteness: official accounting records only part of the violence.

In the novel’s broader treatment of disaster and identity, that problem of recognition has a contemporary parallel. Kido considers children who, because of the Civil Code’s three-hundred-day rule, lack family registers and may therefore remain outside the state’s records even when they meet the conditions for Japanese citizenship. In the tsunami’s aftermath, people without registers could be absent from official counts of both the living and the dead. The parallel does not make these situations identical; it connects disaster to the power of records to determine whose existence institutions can acknowledge.

Narrative significance

The earthquake enters this episode through recollection, research, and apprehension rather than a dramatized account of the 1923 event itself. Its historical violence becomes present-tense pressure on Kido as he imagines a future disaster and his family’s vulnerability. The turn from the public anniversary to the waterfront with Sota brings that fear into the scale of ordinary family life.

The episode also places the earthquake beside questions of documentary absence. Historical prosecution figures cannot fully account for those killed, just as a missing family register can render a living person administratively invisible. Together, these concerns make the disaster a measure of how catastrophe can magnify both physical danger and the exclusions already built into social memory and official recognition.