Fractured communities: *Class and ethnicity in representations of the Great Kanto Earthquake.

On September 1st 1923, a massive earthquake struck the greater Tokyo area. Over 100,000 people were killed and two-thirds of Tokyo was in ruins. After the shocks and flames subsided, the cultural industry attempted to make sense of the disaster. This dissertation examines the resulting products, particularly how social divisions, such as those of class and ethnicity, were articulated or ignored in representations of the earthquake. Though geological forces caused the shifting in the earth's crust, the Great Kanto Earthquake cannot be completely described as a natural disaster. The thesis recognizes both the pre-quake production of vulnerability and the discursive construction of the earthquake as a disaster afterwards. The struggle over interpreting the catastrophe is especially urgent in representations of both the inordinate damage sustained by the lower classes and the Korean massacre. The most widely known earthquake text by a member of the literary elite (the bundan) was Tayama Katai's Record of the Tokyo Earthquake. Reading Katai's book through the trope of the flâneur, Walter Benjamin's wandering urban observer, reveals how Katai's social class, literary philosophy and status as a high culture writer allowed him distance from the suffering and destruction he observed. Masamune Hakucho differentiated his work from earthquake melodramas in his nuanced portrayal of middle-class hardship, The Suffering of Another. In contrast to bundan texts, popular melodramatic fiction was concerned with those who suffered most---the lower classes. In many cases class markers were erased, but Nagata Mikihiko's Wild Dance of the Flames reveals the stark division between the relatively comfortable author/narrator and an impoverished man who lived through the worst of the disaster. High culture fiction strived for art, and melodramas, for emotion, but proletarian representations of the quake and the Korean massacre used these events to convey particular ideologies. Though ethnic tensions caused the massacre, Sano Kesami's The Harbor of Mayhem and Akita Ujaku's Dance of the Skeletons ignore ethnicity to exonerate the working class or call for a universal brotherhood. Each of these texts participates in the discourse of the disaster and reveals the fissures in the illusion of a classless, homogenous Japan.Ph.D.Asian historyAsian literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125959/2/3224816.pd