Korean massacre after the 1923 Kanto earthquake (f3ac291c)

The massacre of Koreans after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake is the novel’s central example of violence returning through public memory and reshaping a character’s understanding of belonging. Almost ninety years after the disaster, coverage of the massacre makes Kido reconsider his Korean ancestry, his Japanese citizenship, and the silences surrounding his Yokohama in-laws’ family history. The event is presented not as a closed episode but as a past whose documented limits, inherited consequences, and threatened recurrence remain present.

Historical Background and Public Memory

The 1923 earthquake devastated Yokohama, where fire destroyed about 80 percent of the urban area. In its aftermath, false rumors of a “Korean riot” circulated; Yokohama was one of the principal places where those rumors originated. Kido learns of this history only after the Great East Japan Earthquake, when media reports repeatedly recall the massacre. The belated discovery unsettles his earlier sense that his ancestry had little bearing on his life.

The past also reaches him through his wife’s family, although no one has discussed it directly. Kaori’s grandfather would have been a young child during the earthquake, while her great-grandfather would have been an adult. Kido wonders what they might have experienced amid the violence, but he has not asked them—or Kaori—about it. Their conversations after the more recent earthquake have focused on the possibility of another major disaster in the Tokyo region, leaving the earlier catastrophe unspoken. The gap between family silence and public reporting makes history both intimate and difficult to know.

What the Records Establish

A television discussion of xenophobia returns to the massacre and prompts Kido to consult records. He finds 53 cases involving the murder of Koreans among documented prosecutions; the Ministry of Justice at the time gave a death count of 233. The passage distinguishes those official figures from the estimated actual toll, which was thought to be several times larger, and notes that Chinese people were also killed. The surviving record therefore supplies concrete evidence of the violence without claiming to capture its full scale.

For Kido, those numbers are not merely historical data. Thinking about the victims brings him into a new sense of identification with Zainichi experiences of victimization, while his status as a Japanese citizen makes him confront a historical responsibility associated with the persecuting side. The event complicates any simple division between personal innocence and collective history: his identity does not make him responsible for acts he did not commit, but it does make the past impossible to dismiss as someone else’s concern.

Kido’s Changing Perspective

Kido’s response develops across two returns to the massacre. Earlier, news of it leads him to reconsider his father-in-law’s welcoming remark about being Zainichi and becoming Japanese after three generations; he wonders whether the words carried an implication he had missed. Later, as reports discuss contemporary xenophobia, he imagines whether anti-Korean hostility could again endanger him and his family. The possibility is sharpened by the prospect of future earthquakes in the Nankai Trough and near Tokyo, disasters that could create conditions of fear in which old rumors and prejudice might reappear.

The historical figures deepen rather than settle that fear. Kido knows that the documented prosecution cases account for only part of the deaths, and the gap between the official count and the much larger estimates confronts him with the limits of what can be securely recounted. His thoughts shift from an abstract awareness of discrimination to a bodily sense of kinship with the dead and, at the same time, unease about his own position within Japanese society. The massacre thus changes how he understands both his ancestry and his obligation to respond to present-day hostility.

Family History and Significance

The novel sets the massacre beside other forms of family memory: the identities attached to surnames, the trees a family chooses to remember, and the losses children struggle to express. These private traces do not provide a substitute for historical documentation. Instead, they show how the past is carried unevenly—through public records and news, through what families discuss, and through questions left unasked. Kido’s speculation about his in-laws remains speculation; the narrative preserves that uncertainty rather than inventing a family account of what they witnessed.

As a result, the massacre functions both as a specific historical atrocity and as a test of the present. Its documented death count establishes the reality of the violence, while the acknowledged incompleteness of the record resists the idea that the event can be neatly contained by a number. Its return in news coverage prompts Kido to recognize that historical memory can alter a person’s sense of belonging and make silence itself consequential. The future danger he fears is not presented as an inevitable repetition, but as a warning against treating the conditions that enabled persecution as safely past.