Korean massacre after the 1923 Kanto earthquake

The massacre of Koreans after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake is a historical atrocity whose delayed return in public memory unsettles Kido’s understanding of ancestry, citizenship, and safety. The novel does not stage the violence directly; instead, it approaches it through reports, historical records, imagined family histories, and Kido’s bodily and moral responses. That mediated account makes the massacre a test of whether the protections of ordinary civic life can withstand collective fear and incitement.

Historical Context and Public Memory

The massacre enters Kido’s awareness decades after the earthquake. Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, media reports repeatedly recalled the killings that followed the 1923 disaster, nearly ninety years earlier. Kido had previously paid little attention to these questions. He learned that Yokohama had been one of the principal places where incendiary false rumors about a supposed Korean riot originated, connecting the city where his in-laws’ family had lived for generations to the history of anti-Korean violence.

The earthquake’s scale makes the history more than a distant date in the news. Kido understands that the disaster devastated Yokohama, with fire destroying 80 percent of its urban areas. His wife’s grandfather would have been a young child at the time, while her great-grandfather was an adult in his prime. Kido wonders what they did amid the violence that followed, but he has never asked them or Kaori. The family’s silence is set against contemporary conversations about the prospect of another major earthquake: catastrophe is discussed as a future physical danger, while the history of violence in its aftermath remains largely unspoken.

From Historical Record to Present Threat

The past becomes newly urgent when Kido encounters the resurgence of public hostility. News coverage links the massacre’s memory to the xenophobic demonstrations of the preceding year, where demonstrators shouted, “Death to Koreans!” Kido recognizes a sharp asymmetry: the careful legal reasoning through which he protects his clients and supports his family depends on an everyday civic order, but that order may not protect people if agitation and falsehood provoke violence. In such a moment, a person’s citizenship, profession, character, or ties to others might count for nothing.

The threat is not confined to the spectacle of a street demonstration. Kido considers how fake news might stir people within ordinary life until they felt entitled to kill members of the Korean community. The massacre’s history gives that possibility a precedent. He imagines whether Rié, who has called him a good person, could testify on his behalf if he were accused of being a spy or challenged with a test used to identify people for killing. He also wonders whether those who targeted him might extend their hostility to her. The questions reveal how little protection personal virtue can offer against collective hatred.

Evidence, Scale, and the Limits of the Record

Kido’s response deepens as he consults records of the Great Kantō Earthquake. The documented prosecutions include fifty-three cases in which Koreans were murdered; the Ministry of Justice at the time counted 233 deaths. The actual toll remains uncertain, with estimates several times higher, and Chinese people were also among those killed. The gap between the official count and the larger estimates is itself significant: the record establishes the scale of the atrocity without resolving its full extent.

The novel keeps the killings largely outside direct depiction and instead follows Kido as he absorbs what the records can and cannot say. Their numbers challenge any assumption that public documentation exhausts the history. He is also confronted by reports of the methods of killing, which make the violence difficult to comprehend. The narrative’s emphasis falls not on reenactment but on the act of encountering evidence and on the way an inherited public history becomes personally consequential.

Kido’s Changing Relation to History

At first, Kido experiences the massacre chiefly as a disturbing historical and political question. The centenary approaching in ten years gives that past a proximity he cannot dismiss. He imagines a future earthquake in the Tokyo region and wonders whether renewed disorder might again expose his family to people stirred by the cry against Koreans. His fear is sharpened by his own biography: he grew up largely as a Japanese person before naturalizing, and he has been unsure whether he should understand himself as a victim of anti-Korean hostility or as implicated in it.

That uncertainty begins to change when Kido imagines the dead as his compatriots and recognizes a sense of identification with Zainichi experiences of victimhood. At the same time, he cannot separate that recognition from his responsibility as a Japanese citizen. The two positions do not cancel each other out; they make his relation to the past more difficult and more accountable. His anxieties also become physical: on a train he struggles with dizziness and distress as the implications of the danger overwhelm him, and he tries to steady himself by recalling Rié’s words of reassurance. The private moment links historical fear to the fragile security of everyday life.

Narrative Significance

The massacre’s return through news, family silence, historical records, and present-day demonstrations gives the novel a structure of delayed recognition. Kido’s in-laws’ connection to Yokohama makes the past intimate without supplying an answer about what their ancestors did; his questions remain unanswered. That gap prevents family belonging from becoming a simple assurance of innocence or safety.

The episode also changes how Kido understands civic responsibility. Legal order sustains his ordinary work and protects rights, but it cannot be treated as invulnerable when hatred is mobilized through rumor. By moving from distance to identification, and from identification to a sense of responsibility, Kido begins to see anti-Korean hostility not as someone else’s issue but as a danger rooted in the society of which he is a citizen. The massacre thus functions as both historical memory and warning: the past is not reproduced as a finished story, but returns as a question about what people will recognize, remember, and resist in the present.