Voices of Vulnerability and Resilience: Children and their Recollections in Post-Earthquake Tokyo

Abstract

Tokyo’s school children began writing essays about the Great Kantō Earthquake within weeks of the disaster as a simple pedagogical exercise. These remarkable accounts provide a panoramic view into children’s first-hand experiences of Japan’s worst natural disaster and daily life in the aftermath. Their usefulness, however, does not end there. In the period following the 1923 earthquake, children possessed a new and different utility to the state as the future generation to be listened to, learned from, and inspired by. Children’s essays struck a fine balance between reflecting on the past and dreaming of a better future. Moreover, they were ideal role models of resilience in an era of spiritual and physical reconstruction. Their promises to study hard, save money, and reconstruct Tokyo ‘even better than before’ represented exactly the kind of values that government officials wanted to cultivate in 1920s Japan.