Kantō Massacre

The massacre began on the day of the earthquake, September 1, 1923, and continued for three weeks. A significant number of incidents occurred, including the Fukuda Village Incident.^[10][11]


Meanwhile, government officials met and created a plan to suppress information about and minimize the scale of the killings. Beginning on September 18, the Japanese government arrested 735 participants in the massacre, but they were reportedly given light sentences. The Japanese Governor-General of Korea paid out 200 Japanese yen in compensation to 832 families of massacre victims, although the Japanese government on the mainland only admitted to about 250 deaths.


In recent years, it has continued to be denied or minimized by both mainstream Japanese politicians and fringe Japanese right-wing groups. Since 2017, the Governor of Tokyo Yuriko Koike has consistently expressed skepticism that the massacre occurred.

Aftermath[edit]

On September 5, after Prime Minister Uchida Kōsai acknowledged that unlawful killings had occurred, Tokyo officials met secretly to discuss a way to deny and minimize the massacre. Laying out their plans in a memorandum, they agreed to minimize the number of dead, blame the rumors of Korean violence on the labor organizer Yamaguchi Seiken, and frame innocent Koreans by accusing them of rioting. This plan was executed in the following months. A ban on reporting the death count was obeyed by all newspapers, while officials claimed only five people had died. On October 21, almost two months after the massacre began, local police arrested 23 Koreans, simultaneously lifting the ban so that the initial reporting on the full scale of the massacre was mixed with the false arrests.^[12]: 94


Beginning on September 18, the Japanese government arrested 735 participants in the massacre. However, the government had no intent of harshly punishing them. In November, the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun reported that during the trials, the defendants and the judges were both smiling and laughing as they recounted the lynchings. The prosecution recommended light sentences.^[31]


As knowledge of the lynch mobs spread through the Korean community, thousands attempted to flee the city. The Tokyo police tasked a collaborationist group called Sōaikai with arresting escaping Koreans and detaining them in camps in Honjo, Tokyo. Tokyo police chief Maruyama Tsurukichi ordered the Sōaikai to confine Koreans to the camps to prevent them from spreading news of the massacre abroad. The Sōaikai eventually ordered 4,000 Koreans to perform unpaid labor cleaning up the city ruins for over two months.^[32]


Yamaguchi was publicly blamed by Japanese officials for starting the rumors of Korean mobs, but charge was never formalized. After being held in prison for several months he was finally prosecuted only for redistributing food and water from ruined houses to earthquake survivors without permission of the homeowners.^{[33][12]: 110} In July 1924 he was sentenced to two years in prison; it is unknown if he survived his imprisonment.^[34]


Korean newspapers in Seoul were blocked from receiving information about the massacre by local police.^[14]: 76 Two Koreans who personally escaped Tokyo and rushed to Seoul to report the news were arrested for "spreading false information" and the news report about them was completely censored.^[35]: 107 When word of the massacre did reach the Korean peninsula, Japan attempted to placate the Koreans by distributing films throughout the country showing Koreans being well treated. These films were reportedly poorly received.^[22]: 168 The Japanese Governor-General of Korea paid out Japanese ¥200 (1923) (equivalent to ¥98,969 or US$908 in 2019)^[36] in compensation to 832 families of massacre victims, although the Japanese government on the mainland only admitted to about 250 deaths.^[37] The Governor-General also published and distributed propaganda leaflets with "beautiful stories" (bidan 美談) of Japanese protecting Koreans from lynch mobs.^[35]: 115 Police chief Nishizaka himself distributed bidan stories of heroic police protecting Koreans, which he later admitted in an interview were carefully selected to omit unflattering aspects.^[12]: 104

Literary and artistic portrayals[edit]

Prewar narratives by Koreans frequently appealed to a Japanese readership to heal the wounds which were caused by ethnic divides, while in the immediate postwar period the "emperor system" was blamed for brainwashing massacre participants to act against their better instincts. After the 1970s such appeals to people's higher consciences faded away, and the massacre became part of a marker of indelible difference between the Japanese and Korean peoples and the Japanese people's willful ignorance of the massacre. Ri Kaisei's 1975 novel Exile and Freedom exemplifies this turning point with a central monologue: "Can you guarantee that it won't happen again right here and now? Even if you did, would your guarantees make Korean nightmares go away? No chance..."^[63]


As the massacre passed out of living memory in the 1990s, it became hidden history to younger generations of Zainichi Koreans. In the 2015 novel Green and Red (Midori to aka 『緑と赤』), by Zainichi novelist Ushio Fukazawa (深沢潮 Fukazawa Ushio), the Zainichi protagonist learns about the massacre by reading about it in a history book, which serves to give excess weight to her fears over anti-Korean sentiment. Fukazawa emphasizes that the narrator is driven to discover this history out of anxiety rather than having any preexisting historical understanding.^[63]


There have been several plays about the massacre. The playwright and Esperantist Ujaku Akita wrote Gaikotsu no buchō (骸骨の舞跳) in 1924, decrying the culture of silence by Japanese; its first printing was banned by the Japanese censors. It was translated into Esperanto as Danco de skeletoj in 1927.^[35]: 174 The playwright Koreya Senda did not write about the violence explicitly, but adopted the pen name "Koreya" after he was mistaken for a Korean by the mob. In 1986, a Japanese playwright, Fukuchi Kazuyoshi (福地一義), discovered his father's diary, read the account of the massacre which is contained in it and wrote a play which is based on his father's account. The play was briefly revived in 2017.^[16]


In the Pachinko novel and in its TV adaptation, a young Hansu escapes Yokohama with his father's former Yakuza employer, Ryoichi from the Great Kantō Earthquake and avoids getting caught by a group of Japanese vigilantes burning a barn of Koreans escaping the massacre in Kantō with the help of a Japanese farmer.