Empire of Humanity: Compassion, Opportunism, and Delusion Following Japan's 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake

Abstract

Following Japan’s calamitous 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, newspapers across American urged readers to respond generously with aid. One declared: people must “give till it hurts.” They did. The American Red Cross in conjunction with civic organizations, newspapers, corporations, and government agencies mobilized one of the largest humanitarian relief campaigns of the pre-1945 era. America’s tsunami of aid donated to Japan surpassed the total raised by all other nations combined. This paper analyzes the patterns of giving that unfolded following the 1923 catastrophe. Expanding on Mark Peattie’s early work on Japanese-American war scares and cultural diplomacy between 1907 and 1933, it explores what donors hoped to accomplish through humanitarian assistance. While compassion motivated countless citizens, others believed that aid could assuage—possibly for years to come—relations that had grown increasingly estranged. Some championed humanitarianism as a moral, uncomplicated, and politically unencumbered foreign policy that demonstrated America’s newfound international stature. Others saw giving as an opportunity to spread religious and cultural values to a prostate people. Still others—namely anti-Japanese associations from the West Coast of America—viewed aid as an insurance policy to stem a potential tidal wave of new emigrants desirous of leaving wrecked Japan. Aid made a deep impression upon Japan, but did it transform bilateral relations as much as the catastrophe itself had altered the physical landscape of eastern Japan? Or, was such optimism delusional, inspired by the chimerical belief that natural catastrophes and responses to them have the power to change everything.