The Meiji earthquake: Nature, nation, and the ambiguities of catastrophe

On October 28, 1891, one of the most powerful earthquakes in modern Japanese history rocked the main island of Honshu from Tokyo to Osaka. Centered on the populous Nobi Plain north of Nagoya, this was the first daishinsai ('great earthquake disaster') of the Meiji era, and the strongest to visit central Japan in 37 years. The Great Nobi Earthquake killed only 7-8,000 people (compared to the over 100,000 destined to die in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923), mostly inhabitants of towns and villages in Nagoya's hinterland. But its breadth and power were unprecedented in the memories of most Japanese, and the event became the subject of many dozens of books, newspaper and journal articles, paintings and woodblock prints, and even images on fans, plates, and lampshades. This was Japan's first truly national natural catastrophe. It was national in the sense that it was deemed by many of its narrators to have affected the new nation-state directly, and a nationalizing discourse of alarm, regret, recrimination, sympathy, and even patriotism was generated around it by a newly-consolidating modern print media. © 2006 Cambridge University Press.