Thinking about the economic consequences of the Great Kanto Earthquake

The decade following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 witnessed a proliferation of writings by officials, academics, businessmen, and journalists on the economic consequences of the disaster. This abundance of contemporary analysis stands in strong contrast to the relative scarcity of subsequent scholarly studies of many aspects of the disaster’s economic impact. In this article, I suggest that part of the reason for this relative lacuna lies in broader trends within economics and economic history scholarship. In particular, a focus on quantitative analysis and macro-level indicators has led to the conclusion that over the longer term, the Kantō earthquake, like similar disasters elsewhere, did not matter that much for the development of the country’s economy. I also show that although recent advances in economic theory, especially in the economics of disasters, can strengthen historians’ analyses of the economic consequences of the 1923 disaster, many of these ‘new’ conceptual frameworks were foreshadowed by contemporary commentators seeking to analyze the impact of the disaster on the economic life of the nation. Ikeuchi Yukichika’s book Shinsai Keizai Shigan, published in December 1923, is a particularly good example of how, just like recent disaster economists, Japanese contemporaries viewed the analysis of markets as the key to understanding both the economic impact of the disaster and how best to rebuild Japan’s economy.