Kantō Massacre

Korean laborers in Yokohama had joined a stevedore union led by the Japanese organizer Yamaguchi Seiken. Yamaguchi was a left-wing organizer and at the May Day rally in 1920, some of his union members had shouted anti-colonial slogans; Japanese police responded with arrests and abuse. On September 1, 1923, immediately after the earthquake, Yamaguchi organized his union to provide food and water to the neighborhood, including commandeering supplies from ruined buildings. Police regarded the labor union as a "nest of socialists" and were likely unsettled by the well-organized food relief program.[12]^: 108

Kanagawa Prefectural Police chief Nishizaka Katsuto reported that on the night of September 1 he gave his district chiefs "a certain mission to deal with the emergency situation," the details of which he refused to describe.[12]^: 97 Towards the end of his life, Nishizaka told an interviewer that "someone must have said that 'Korean malcontents' were dangerous in such a time of confusion."[12]^: 104

According to multiple reports from Japanese witnesses, beginning on the night of September 2 police officers in Yokohama, Kanagawa and Tokyo began informing residents that it was permissible to kill Koreans. Some orders were conditional, such as killing Koreans who resist arrest, but others were more direct: "kill any Koreans who enter the neighborhood" or "kill any Koreans you find."[12]^: 98–99 Also on the night of September 2, as police organized a vigilante band to kill Koreans in the Noge region of Yokohama, one of the organizing police officers told a newspaper reporter that Koreans had been caught with a list of neighborhoods to burn, carrying gasoline and poison for wells.[12]^: 105 In the town of Yokosuka, police officers told locals that Korean men were raping Japanese women, inciting Japanese men to form vigilante lynch mobs.[12]^: 111 In Bunkyō, the police falsely reported that Koreans had poisoned the water and food supply.[13]^: 146 Nishizaka's final report on the massacre acknowledges in a secret appendix that these rumors were all false.[12]^: 115[14]^: 92

As a result of the police-initiated rumors, beginning on September 2, Japanese citizens organized themselves into vigilante bands and accosted strangers on the street. Those believed to be Korean or Chinese were murdered on the spot.[15]

Koreans and Chinese wore Japanese clothing in order to hide their identities. They also tried to properly pronounce shibboleths such as "十五円五十銭" (15 yen and 50 sen), with difficult elongated vowels.[16] Those who failed these tests were killed. The ethnic Japanese playwright Koreya Senda was targeted by a mob, and wrote of his experience in 1988:[17]

On the second night after the earthquake, there were foolish rumors about Koreans who were allegedly on their way to raid the town to get revenge on the Japanese [...] It turned out that I was mistaken for Korean, and they wouldn’t believe me even though I denied it over and over saying, "I am Japanese…I am a student at Waseda University," with my student ID at hand. They asked me to say "a i u e o" and recite the names of the emperors in Japanese history….Fortunately, there was a person who recognized me.

The filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, who was a child at the time, was astonished to witness the irrational behavior of the mob.

With my own eyes I saw a mob of adults with contorted faces rushing like an avalanche in confusion, yelling, “This way!” “No, that way!” They were chasing a bearded man, thinking someone with so much facial hair could not be Japanese....Simply because my father had a full beard, he was surrounded by a mob carrying clubs. My heart pounded as I looked at my brother, who was with him. My brother was smiling sarcastically....[18]

On the morning of September 3, the Home Ministry issued a message to police stations around the capital encouraging the spread of rumors and violence, stating that “there are a group of people who want to take advantage of disasters. Be careful because Koreans are planning terrorism and robbery by arson and bombs."[19]^: 73

Some Koreans sought safety in police stations in order to escape the slaughter, but in some areas vigilantes broke into police stations and pulled them out. In other cases, police officers handed groups of Koreans over to local vigilantes, who proceeded to kill them.[20]

Both vigilantes and Imperial Japanese Army troops burned Korean bodies in order to destroy the evidence of murder.[12]^: 93 Official Japanese reports in September claimed that only five Koreans had been killed, and even years after, the number of acknowledged deaths remained in the low hundreds. After the massacre, Korean survivors painstakingly documented the extent of the massacre. Based on their testimonies, Japanese eyewitness accounts, and additional academic research, current estimates of the death toll range from 6,000 to 9,000.[21][22]^: 167–8[23] Between 50 and 90 percent of the Korean population of Yokohama was killed.[12]^: 93

September 15: Prince Regent hearing reports at Ueno Park from Home Minister Viscount Shinpei Goto and Superintendent of political affairs of Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (警視庁, Keishichō) Yuasa Kurahei − during his inspection tour over the devastated Capital.

Amidst the mob violence, regional police and the army used the pretext of civil unrest to liquidate political dissidents.[24] Socialists such as Hirasawa Keishichi (平澤計七) and the Chinese communal leader Wang Xitian (王希天), were abducted and killed by local police and army, who claimed the radicals intended to use the crisis as an opportunity to overthrow the Japanese government.[24][25]

In what became known as the Amakasu Incident, the couple Sakae Ōsugi (Japan's first Esperanto teacher) and Noe Itō, both anarchists and feminists, were executed by army officer Masahiko Amakasu along with Ōsugi's six-year-old nephew. The bodies of the couple and child were thrown in a well. The incident caused national outrage, albeit thousands signed petitions requesting leniency on Amakasu's behalf. The murders drew attention in the United States, since the child was a dual-national with American citizenship, having been born Portland, Oregon. Efforts to get the American Embassy involved were unsuccessful. One embassy official made a brief statement on the case.[26]

"In the case, even, of an unquestioned American citizen involved in trial in a foreign court, the law of that country must take its course, and we can only be interested in seeing that the trial is fair and the law impartially applied."

Amakasu and four other army soldiers were court-martialed for the murders. During the trial, Amakasu's lawyers tied the murder to soldierly duties, and the ideals of spontaneity, sincerity, and pure motives. They argued that Sakae and Noe were traitors, and Amakasu killed them out of an irresistible urge to protect the country. As for the murder of the child, they argued that this was still justifiable for the public good. Many in the courtroom sympathized with these arguments, with spectators loudly calling Amakasu a "kokushi" (hero). The judge did nothing to intervene. Even the military prosecutor, while unwilling to accept the defense's arguments as an excuse, was sympathetic. Believing that Amakasu had merely acted excessively, he said the officer's patriotism "brought tears into one's eyes". As such, he demanded only 15 years in prison with hard labour for Amakasu, and lesser punishments for the other defendants.[27]

The judge was even more lenient. Amakasu was sentenced to ten years in prison with hard labour, and army sergeant Keijiro Mori was sentenced to three years in prison with hard labour as an accomplice. The other three men were acquitted, two on the grounds of superior orders, and the other due to insufficient evidence. In August 1924, Amakasu's sentence was reduced to 7 years and six months.[28] He was released due to an amnesty in October 1926. Amakasu studied in France and became a special agent for the Imperial Japanese Army in Manchuria. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, he killed himself with potassium cyanide.[29][30]

After the massacre, Navy Minister Takarabe Takeshi praised the Japanese lynch mobs for their "martial spirit," describing them as a successful result of military conscription.[12]^: 114 Paper plays called kamishibai were performed for children which portrayed the slaughter with vivid, bloody illustrations. Performers would encourage children to cheer for the lynch mobs as they killed "dangerous" Koreans.[35]^: 182 In 1927, an official history of Yokohama City claimed that the rumors of Korean attackers had "some basis in fact."[12]^: 116

In 2000, the Governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara received international criticism for claiming that sangokujin (a term originally referring to foreigners, and now considered xenophobic and harsh) could be "expect[ed] to riot in the event of a disastrous earthquake".[38][39] He later claimed he would stop using the word "sangokujin", but refused to apologize or withdraw the substance of his remark.[40][39]

The issue has been rekindled in modern times. Miyoko Kudō's 2009 book The Great Kanto Earthquake: The Truth About the "Massacre of Koreans" (関東大震災「朝鮮人虐殺」の真実) was influential in inspiring grassroots-level attempts to whitewash the issue in official and public commemorations.[41] Several books denying the massacre and supporting the government narrative of 1923 became bestsellers in the 2010s.[42] In April 2017, the Cabinet Office deleted historical evidence and acknowledgement of the massacre from their website.[43] Beginning in 2017, Tokyo mayor Yuriko Koike broke decades of precedent by refusing to acknowledge the massacre or offer condolences to the descendants of survivors. She justified this by saying that whether a massacre occurred is a matter of historical debate.[44] In July 2020, Koike was re-elected as mayor of Tokyo in a landslide victory.[45] In 2022, it was reported that Koike had declined to send a commemorative message for the sixth year in a row.[46][47][48]

Every year since 1974, the Japan–Korea Association (日朝協会, Niccho Kyokai) has held a memorial ceremony in Yokoamichō Park in memory of the victims of the massacre.[47][46][48] However, the memorial ceremony is regularly met with counter protests, especially by the organization Japan Women's Group Gentle Breeze (日本女性の会そよ風, or "そよ風").[49][46][48][50] This group has denied the massacre and called for the memorial ceremony to be banned on a number of occasions.[49] For example, in 2020, the group displayed a sign reading "The massacre of Koreans is a lie".[46] This has resulted in violence on some occasions, including in 2019.[46]

In June 2019, J. Mark Ramseyer, the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard University, published a paper in which he first reiterated contemporary Japanese newspapers' rumors about Koreans: "they poisoned water supplies, they murdered, they pillaged, they raped". Ramseyer then said "The puzzle is not whether this happened. It is how extensively it happened."[51][52] Ramseyer also drew controversy that same year for describing "comfort women" (a euphemism for forced prostitutes) as engaging in a "consensual, contractual process".[52] After receiving criticism from a number of scholars over the methodologies and views in the paper, Ramseyer's paper was withdrawn. The editor of the handbook in which it was published, Alon Harel, said of the paper's disputed portions: "It was evidently an innocent and very regrettable mistake on our part. [...] We assumed that Professor Ramseyer knows the history better than us. In the meantime, we have learnt a lot about the events and we sent a list of detailed comments on the paper that were written by professional historians and lawyers".[53]

In 1996, historian J. Michael Allen remarked that the massacre is "hardly known outside Korea."[14]^: 85

The writer Katō Naoki has published a number of books on the topic. In 2014, he published September on the Streets of Tokyo (九月、東京の路上で, Kugatsu, Tōkyō no rojō de). This book has also been translated into Esperanto.[54] In 2019, he published another book entitled Trick that discusses tactics used to deny the massacre.[55]

The Zainichi Korean Oh Choong-kong (Korean: 오충공; Hanja: 吳充功) made two documentaries about the massacre. The first is the 1983 film Hidden Scars: The Massacre of Koreans from the Arakawa River Bank to Shitamachi in Tokyo (隠された爪跡: 東京荒川土手周辺から下町の虐殺, Kakusareta tsumeato: Tokyo aragawa dote shūhen kara Shitamachi no gyakusatsu). The second is the 1986 film The Disposed-of Koreans: The Great Kanto Earthquake and Camp Narashino (払い下げられた朝鮮人: 関東大震災と習志野収容所, Harasagareta Chōsenjin: Kantō Daishinsai to Narashino shūyōjo).[56][57][58]