Survivor of 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake
On Sept 1, 1923, a magnitude-7.9 earthquake occurred almost at noon, killing 105,000 people around Sagami Bay and Tokyo Bay.
A very old woman, today 109 years old, remembers how she acted on the tragic day.
Tei Hidaka was a female clerk of a foreign firm situated near China Town of Yokohama City. The 19-year-old female worker heard a roaring sound and then felt a very violent tremor. She fell on the floor but managed to stand up with a great effort but in the next moment she fell again, which she repeated several times. Then somebody shouted, "Fire! Run away!"
After experiencing seven minutes of violent quakes, she fled to the Yokohama public park walking over a heap of rubble. There were tens of thousands evacuees in the park. The place was so crowded. And big fires surrounded the park. People were trapped there without a way out. Hidaka extinguished small fires induced by sparks flying into the Park from burning buildings all through the day and even at night. She also took care of the injured and the wounded in the horrible night. The park was illuminated so ghostly by fires.
Then a long night was over. She saw many dead bodies on the ground and streets. Then she met some foreigners who were walking to Motomachi Town. They kindly gave her some medicines and bandages. With these medical aids, she began to take care of disaster victims on the street, forgetting about herself.
Later her individual relief activities became widely known, so that a newspaper reported on her with a title of "Angel Coming to Afflicted Streets." Even the office of Kanagawa Prefecture, where the port city Yokohama was situated, gave an official award to Hidaka.
This Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed most of urban districts of Yokohama, 30 km southwest of Tokyo. Yokohama City lost 26,000 citizens due to this M7.9 earth quake and subsequent fires.
Anyway it is very rare today to directly here from someone that experienced the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.
On the other hand in Tokyo at the time, tens of thousands of citizens were killed due to this natural disaster which could however happen once in every 100 years. As there were too many dead bodies to handle, the then Tokyo City Office was embarrassed after the earthquake and extinction of fires. How could they handle this number of the dead? But there came a man who claimed that his invention was effective in disposing of those dead bodies. As this inventor had been somewhat familiar to parties concerned, officials decided to use his heavy oil combustion system for dead bodies.
This system could dispose of 1,000 dead bodies per day, But it was in November that Tokyo City could cremate all the dead bodies of victims. The inventor carried out this hard task as his service to Tokyo City but not as commercial business. He later invented a new waste incineration system and founded a company to contract Tokyo City.
Incidentally, one of the reasons why so many deadly fires started after the earthquake was that in Tokyo at the time there were many laboratories and testing rooms in universities, schools, research centers, and businesses which had some combustible chemical and flammable goods without sufficient protection. When these substances and products fell from shelves to the floor, they took fire.
Because the earthquake struck at lunchtime when many people were cooking meals over fire, many people died as a result of the many large fires that broke out. Some fires developed into firestorms that swept across cities. Many people died when their feet became stuck in melting tarmac. The single greatest loss of life was caused by a firestorm-induced fire whirl that engulfed open space at the Rikugun Honjo Hifukusho (formerly the Army Clothing Depot) in downtown Tokyo, where about 38,000 people were incinerated after taking shelter there following the earthquake. The earthquake broke water mains all over the city, and putting out the fires took nearly two full days until late in the morning of September 3. An estimated 140,000 people were killed and 447,000 houses were destroyed by the fire alone.
Intensity of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and its Epicenters (two locations)
So this scale of an earthquake can occur before, during, and after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It is not right for Tokyo to host Olympic Games in 2020.
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Sagami Bay
