What Kurosawa Saw: The Great Kanto Earthquake Of 1923

The appalling sights the 2011 Sendai earthquake left in its wake are something greater than horrifying. Most tragic of all, it wasn’t the earthquake that did damage, despite its force. It was the tsunami generated as a result. We know of no realistic way to defend ourselves from a killer wave. Even a country lauded as the safest on the planet could not protect itself from the water’s might. Japan, of course, is recognized as Earth's most tremor-prone country. Its people have seen much across many generations. In fact, an earthquake was an instrumental experience for one of the country’s greatest sons – and a man many regard as the world’s finest director – Akira Kurosawa.

Most will have heard of (and may even remember) the Great Hanshin earthquake, or the Kobe earthquake, of 1995, which Haruki Murakami tangentially wrote about in his ‘concept album’ after the quake. But there's been little media coverage on Japan’s most fatal quake, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which razed Tokyo and Yokohama to the ground in their entirety. The death toll numbered well over 100,000. Those not beaten by the tremor and destruction had to contend with small localized fires that eventually grew to a giant firestorm. 


Kurosawa was thirteen at the time and was returning home from a visit to a bookstore in the city. When the quake struck he rushed home to check on his family, tracing the devastated streets while buildings collapsed around him.


Miraculously, all his family had survived. They were, in fact, enraged at him. In order to sprint home he had removed his traditional clogs. To do so was a great offense. His family all still wore theirs. He was the only one who had “conducted himself in a disorderly fashion” in the face of disaster. For shame!

The experience had a great impact on Kurosawa’s life. One imagines it’s impossible for such a disaster to pass ignored. In his autobiography, in a passage entitled ‘Darkness and Humanity,’ he writes that he learned not only of the extraordinary power of nature, but also of what lies in the human heart. Such an influence burned itself into his works. Perhaps in light of this, it’s not too much a stretch to see why Kurosawa was so interested in the human condition. Examinations of such themes appear throughout his films. “Fear peoples the darkness with monsters,” Kurosawa writes. Scenes of apocalypse can be found in Kagemusha and Ran – the destruction of a battlefield, a warzone rendered in sickly yellow-red, like the sky above Tokyo following the quake. The persecution of Koreans after the disaster, incited by the darkness and the fear, must have impacted the director. The Koreans were responsible for the quake; the Koreans were responsible for the deaths of government officials; the Koreans were poisoning the wells. So chanted desperate mobs on the street. Allegories can be drawn in the director’s films, like the villagers capturing and killing or stealing from samurai in Seven Samurai.

In his autobiography, Kurosawa shares with us horrifying imagery. In the days following the earthquake, the youth went out with his older brother, Hisao, to survey the carnage. The pair spent the day drifting through the wrecked city.


Kurosawa remembers it as an “expedition to conquer fear.” It is his director’s mind that provides such rich imagery. That he could recount such a devastating sight so vividly forty years later speaks not only to how the event impressed on him. It serves also as a fair indication of the imagery he would later take license from; the imagery that influenced his work. Once more, I return to Kagemusha and the film’s conclusion: a battlefield lined with the bloody bodies of soldiers; a battlefield filled with crushed, fallen horses. There’s an indistinct, hazy quality, as if we can’t really believe what we’re seeing, or, rather, that our minds are unwilling to process the detail before us.

The earthquake struck in the director’s formative years. Children that want to forget challenging events often will rid them from the forefronts of their conscious minds. One gets the feeling the Kurosawa didn’t really want to forget. But little good can come from such a calamity. Kurosawa was spurred on by his brother’s courage, and perhaps also by his brother’s fear – something that was evident but that his brother fought to suppress. There is nothing to be afraid of.