Kerry Smith
Associate Professor:
History
Phone: +1 401 863 1246
Kerry_Smith@Brown.EDU
Professor Smith is developing a book-length exploration of the social and cultural histories of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. That event, which devastated most of present-day Tokyo and many of the surrounding communities, stands out as a key but largely unexamined rupture in the history of modern Japan.
Biography
Kerry Smith did his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard, and joined the Brown History Department in 1997. He is the author of A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization (Harvard University Press), a number of shorter works on the social history of interwar Japan, and a prize-winning article on Japan's first "official" museum of the war years. Professor Smith teaches the introductory survey on Japanese civilization, as well as courses on World War Two in the Pacific, modern Japan's social history, and the West's encounter with Japan. Prof. Smith is a Faculty Teaching Fellow at the Sheridan Center.
Interests
What Was Lost: Japan in the Aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake
Osugi Sakae may be the Great Kanto Earthquake's most famous victim. Modern Japanese history textbooks, both the English and Japanese language varieties, invariably offer estimates of the numbers left dead and wounded by the 1923 quake and the fires which followed, but these numbers represent anonymous deaths, including 100,000 or so nameless victims. Readers of such texts often learn that thousands of Koreans were also massacred at the hands of vigilante groups, and that a small number of labor activists were killed by the police and by soldiers. Neither the victims nor their killers are named. Osugi, however, is almost always named, and he is identified in mainstream texts in terms of what he had been before the disaster – one of Japan's most famous public radicals, an anarchist, author and sometimes advocate of "free love" – and what he became in its aftermath – the murder victim of Military Police Captain Amakasu Masahiko. As some texts will note, Amakasu also killed Osugi's wife Ito Noe, a well-known activist in her own right, as well as Osugi's seven year old nephew, but one is never far from the knowledge that their deaths occurred as a consequence of their proximity to Osugi.
My current search seeks to locate such acts of public violence in the wake of the disaster, and the trials of those accused of such acts, at the center of an exploration of questions of repair, justice, and loss beginning in 1920s Japan.
Objectives and Significance
What Was Lost: Japan in the Aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake will be one of the first books in English to critically examine the social and cultural implications of the disaster, and the first to situate the complicated histories of this event within the historical scholarship emerging at the intersection of the study of natural hazards, acts of terror, trauma, and state power. Although the 1923 earthquake has long been a cited as a turning point in the history of modern Japan (perhaps because of the magnitude of the loss and the difficulties associated with constructing a narrative that can encompass it), historians writing in both Japanese and English to date have tended to focus on those elements of the event that helped them shed light on other concerns – urban planning, elite politics, and labor history among them. What Was Lost, in contrast, is primarily concerned with the disaster and efforts to recover from it, and will bring together in one work a detailed examination of those legacies for modern Japan. What Was Lost represents a first step towards a history of the 1920s that includes the earthquake, and a history of the earthquake which includes the 1920s. I hope lead to a significant re-thinking of commonly held ideas about both.
Part of what I hope to do in this book is to tie together this history of the disaster in the 1920s with the story of the creation and dissemination of public and popular histories of the trials, the victims, and the defendants since 1923 and especially since 1963. More specifically, I'm interested in shedding light on how an event like the killing of Osugi, for example, was rescued from the relative obscurity into which it disappeared after the 1920s to become what is today, the single most familiar reminder of that era's injustices and violence. Much of the interest in popular memory and the construction of historical narratives in Japan has focused on what has been remembered, and what forgotten, about the experiences and conduct of the Second World War. What Was Lost seeks to complicate our understanding of postwar historical memory and history writing by looking at the role played by local historians, civic organizations, and grass-roots activists in bringing acts of terror and the trials associated with the earthquake to light once again. As far as I know these efforts are unique, in that no other historical moment in pre-1945 Japan has been the subject of such sustained inquiry and activism around questions of injustice and loss, fueled by demands for remembrance and repair.
One of the goals of this project will be to examine the ways in which history texts, museums, memorial sites, and, most recently, the testimony of a Korean survivor of the post-quake massacre and demands by the Japan Bar Association that the Japanese government address her suffering as a human rights violation, have repeatedly confronted modern Japanese society with evidence of a troubling and unsettled past. Addressing those questions will of course also allow the book to "discover" the communities of scholars, students, activists and others actually engaged in the fight to bring these histories to light, and to share those discoveries with an English-language audience.
Such an approach, and the decision to construct the book around the earthquake, owes a great deal to recent scholarship on the transformative effects of disaster and terror, and on the exercise of power in their aftermath. Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and State of Exception, for example, offer compelling vocabularies for an analysis of state-sponsored violence, and provide a useful comparative framework within which to situate Japan's post-quake experiences with martial law and permanent states of emergency. What Was Lost also shares a common approach, and many of the concerns, of works like Ted Steinberg's Acts of God, John Barry's Rising Tide, and Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice in its focus on how trials and efforts at repair transformed social and legal landscapes. This book has the potential, I'd argue, to speak in important ways both to specialists in the history of modern Japan and to the much wider audience interested in the ways natural hazards and man-made disasters have transformed modern societies.
Similarly, that the book also raises questions about how the earthquake and the terror that followed have been rendered historically, and situates it within a growing body of work on historical injustice, memory, and repair. As mentioned above, Japan has figured in these analyses primarily in terms of what many have described as its failure to address the legacies of empire and the Second World War. Without suggesting that the questions of war responsibility and war memory have been answered, I would like to shift the focus of inquiry to examine the ways in which histories and public memory of the traumas of 1923 have taken shape alongside this much more visible discourse on the 1930s and 1940s. Histories of the earthquake and subsequent acts of violence have tended to be overshadowed by the immensity of the destruction inflicted by Japan on the rest of Asia, and the destruction experienced by Japan itself in 1945. Yet a series of overlapping developments within academia and activist groups have fueled a persistent, quite remarkable agenda of historical inquiry dedicated to illuminating the wrongs done to the victims of earthquake violence and, somehow, repairing those injustices. By foregrounding the ways in which these processes have unfolded in postwar Japan (and to some extent, in South Korea as well), What Was Lost will both shed light on an a neglected aspect of recent social history, and allow for a more complicated discussion of Japanese efforts at confronting historical injustices than has been possible up to this point.
Methodology and Sources
What Was Lost relies on four trials (and the events that precipitated them) to provide the narrative and analytical framework for its exploration of the earthquake. Analyzing these trials and exploring their complicated legal and social implications is at the center of my work. Osugi's murder and the prosecution of Amakasu and several co-defendants were the first in a series of acts of terror and public trials closely tied in time and place to the disaster. A few weeks after the verdicts were announced in the Amakasu case, Nanba Daisuke, a young man from a wealthy and respected family, used an old gun disguised as a walking stick to shoot through the window of the Regent's car as it passed by Toranomon, near the Imperial Palace. The Regent, who in just a few years would take his father's place as Emperor, was unharmed. Not so the government, which resigned en masse, and not so the nation's hope that it would face no more calamities in a year already full of them. One month before Nanba's trial was scheduled to begin, and a year to the day after the September 1, 1923 earthquake, members of the "Guillotine Society" attempted to assassinate former General Fukuda Masataro, who had authority over Tokyo in the weeks following the disaster. The attack was followed by the bombing of a police station, a train line, and the delivery of a letter bomb to Fukuda's home. When members of the Society were eventually arrested (the police reportedly tortured one of the first suspects in their custody in order to obtain the information they needed to locate the others), it was discovered that several were former colleagues or followers of Osugi Sakae. Despite the claims of the group's leaders to the contrary, the government at trial characterized their motives as revenge for Osugi's death. The last in this series of court cases and traumas associated with the earthquake was the long-awaited trial of Pak Yul, a Korean subject, and Kaneko Fumiko. The two lovers had been arrested on September 3 and 4, 1923 on minor charges that were later dropped in favor of accusations that the two were plotting to import explosive devices into the country, and possibly use them against members of the Imperial household. They were not brought to trial until February 1926.
That trials are useful places to look for insights into social and cultural history is hardly an original observation. "The popular trial," Robert Harriman writes, "is also a form of social knowledge in that it is the means by which we hold what we know….It is a means by which we create, disseminate, judge, and ratify as facts those assumptions about the world and the values of the community that together are supposed to be informing the laws." From Carlos Ginzburg's Cheese and the Worms to works in Japanese history by Stephen Large and Richard Mitchell, examples of how such an approach can succeed are many. This project uses the courtroom expositions and public discourses associated with the court martial of Osugi's killers, the trials and executions of Nanba Daisuke and members of the Guillotine Society, and the trial and death sentences (later commuted) for Pak Yul and Kaneko Fumiko to explore some of the most pressing problems of repair and justice in post-earthquake Japan. These include questions of how the authorities and the public too would seek to explain and respond to the unprecedented acts of violence inflicted by citizens on each other and on Koreans, by representatives of the state (like Amakasu) on victims (like Osugi), and by citizens representative of the state. How did the state's handling of key trials allow for the construction of a popular history that elided acts of terror, and made folk heroes out of people like Amakasu? Similarly, both the disaster itself and the debates that unfolded within the trials presented seemingly incontrovertible evidence that the nation was at great risk, vulnerable in ways it had never been before. Attacks on the Regent and on other symbols of authority, and the conspiracies attributed to Pak Yul and Kaneko, may well have facilitated a forgetting of the violence visited on others, if not provided a justification of those acts. Such an insistence on the fragility of social order, I'll argue, went hand in hand with the creation of something that looks more and more to me like a permanent but unofficial state of emergency in the mid-1920s. Even as all adult males were granted the right to vote in 1924, for example, in many other respects expectations that Japanese society could become more just over time seem to have been abandoned or suppressed in the aftermath of the disaster. The stories tied to these four trials, fascinating in their own right, reveal a great deal about how the courts and the state shaped the process of post-disaster recovery and repair in such a way as to diminish expectations that a better society could rise from the ashes of the old.
One searches in vain, for example, for sustained efforts after the trials to commemorate the victims of the acts of violence in the quake's aftermath, or to raise questions about how justice was meted out by the courts. There simply were none, due in large part of persistent government censorship and the increasingly harsh suppression of "dissident" views in the 1930s and on into the war years. It isn't until the 1960s, as preparations to mark the fortieth anniversary of the earthquake were underway, that groups of historians, former colleagues and in some instances students of murdered activists, and witnesses to the post-disaster violence began to organize public events and to publish their research findings on the killings and the trials.
Trial transcripts, accounts written by attorneys and other participants in the court processes, popular media coverage of the trials, prison journals, and literary works are among the sources I'll turn to first in developing the book over the course of the fellowship year. Having been to Japan several times in connection with this project, my sense is that I have collected a sufficient body of materials from the archives with which to proceed, and know where to go to track down any loose ends. In addition, I've both worked with the rich Japanese-language scholarship on the disaster for several years as the preliminary components of this project have taken shape, and am fortunate to know many of the researchers now focusing on this era in modern Japan's history.
Since the mid-1960s groups of scholars and local activists have been instrumental in both locating key documentary evidence, and in making their findings available to the general public. Periods of scholarly and community activity and publication have tended to cluster around ten year anniversaries of the earthquake, beginning with the fortieth in 1963. What Was Lost will draw on the records and publications associated with each commemorative moment, starting in 1963, and ending with the most recent symposiums and conferences on the 80th anniversary of the disaster, in which I participated. The book will also trace the emergence of a mainstream history of the trials and the violence through an analysis of high school history texts, museums and other sites for the creation of public memory, and explore how presentations of the events associated with the quake have evolved alongside challenges to the state's censorship of the quake's history, and changes in Japan's relationships with its neighbors. As one of the last steps in the research process, I plan to interview key historians and activists regarding their role in, and responses to, the postwar construction of histories of the earthquake and ongoing efforts at repair.
Awards
2003 G. Wesley Johnson Prize, National Council on Public History (given for the best article in The Public Historian that volume year)
1999 Northeast Asia Council Association for Asian Studies Travel Grant
1998 - 1999 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars
1990 - 1993 Foreign Research Scholar, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo
1992 - 1993 Harvard University Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, Supplemental Dissertation Grant
1991 - 1992 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
1990 - 1991 Institute of International Education (IIE) Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship
1988 - 1990 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship
Affiliations
Association for Asian Studies
Funded Research
1998 - 1999 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars
1992 - 1993 Harvard University Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, Supplemental Dissertation Grant
1991 - 1992 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
1990 - 1991 Institute of International Education (IIE) Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship
Curriculum Vitae
