Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II Book

During world war 2 the Japanese killed a lot of Filipinos especially during the orgy of killings their crazed soldiers, facing certain defeat, did during the battle for the liberation of Manila. Unknown to many, however, some two decades before this it was the Philippines which killed thousands of Japanese and other nationalities and flattened two cities'Yokohama and Japan. This was during the "Kanto Daishinsai" or the Great Kanto Earthquake which occurred around two minutes before noon of September 1, 1923. This was how the Philippines did it:


"Six miles beneath the floor of Sagani Bay, under thick layers of silt and sedimentary rock, the Philippine Sea playte begins a forty-five-degree descent toward the liquid mantle of the earth. As it strains silently against the softer and more malleable Eurasian continental plate, creeping, edging, sliding forward by two or three inches a year, the massive slabs gradually build up pressure, until the interface between the two plates can hold no longer. At that moment, an event that occurs roughly once a century in Japan, a portion of the ocean plate lunges forward, forcing up the continental plate and releasing a burst of destructive energy. It was precisely this scenario that occurred at two minutes before noon on September 1, 1923. A sixty-mile-long by sixty-mile-wide segment of the Philippine plate suddenly ruptured, fractured, and thrust itself forward and downward to a point thirty miles below Tokyo. If a witness could have observed the movement from on high, he would have watched the entire Miura Peninsula, east of Tokyo Bay, plus the Kanto Plain and the surrounding regions'the upper side of the plate interface'rear upward and south ward by twenty feet over a period of sixty seconds. The lowered of the plate interface, Sagami Bay, slid simultaneously downward and to the north. The initial seismic vibrations'primary waves'raced from the fault zone on a diagonal path to the surface of the earth a speed of eighteen thousand miles an hour. Behind them came slower and more destructive vibrations'shear waves'moving at roughly seventy-five hundred miles an hour. These vibrations traveled with a lateral motion, shaking the earth violently as they burrowed through the crust. A third and fourth set of vibrations'Rayleigh and Love waves'then shot directly up from the fault and followed the contours of the earth's surface. The waves shook the ground in rolling vertical and horizontal motions, similar to the action of ocean swells."


One survivor related his experience this way: it was around noontime in his familiar city and after the tremor, in the blink of an eye, the city is no more. Rubbles everywhere instead of buildings, and he didn't even know where he was since the streets and familiar landmarks have disappeared.

Then came the tsunami and the fires, fire sso great that what the falling debris failed to kill, the fires finished off. Harrowing tales of victims still alive, pinned by fallen slabs of cement or wood, crying helplessly for rescue until the flames reached them. Tornados of fire so hot that even the coins inside the victims' pockets melted, boats on the catching fire from the shore. Of the pre-earthquake population of 2 million in Tokyo, 84,014 perished. In Yokohama, 30, 771 died out of the population of 434, 170. There were around 250,000 injured in both cities combined. Only a few buildings were left standing. The Great Kanto Earthquake was the most terrible calamity of the 20th century until it was eclipsed by the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, China and the tsunami in southeast Asia last 2004.


Why the frequent earthquakes in Japan? Three geological plates (and possibly even more)'the Pacific Ocean plate, the Philippine Sea plate, and the Eurasian continental plate'are constantly pressing and straining against one another, placing enough stress on the Japanese islands to keep them in a constant state of instability. When the pressure finally exceeds the strength of the interface between the plates, which happens somewhere in Japan once every decade or so, it is released suddenly: a massive shift takes place along one of these geological fault lines, directly beneath Japan, with terrifying force, says the book.