1923 Kanto Earthquake: China's Aid and a Forgotten Massacre

The Great Kanto Earthquake struck Japan on September 1, 1923, killing more than 100,000 people. China’s Beiyang government quickly allocated 200,000 yuan for disaster relief and dispatched navy vessels to carry supplies. Former premier Duan Qirui launched a “disaster relief comrades’ association” in Tianjin and personally donated 100,000 yuan. According to incomplete figures, Chinese official and private donations of money and goods totaled several million yuan.

That aid, given a century ago, has resurfaced in discussion on the Chinese internet. A Zhihu author writing under the name “Chahu Looks at the World” revisited the history and argued that Chinese generosity was not repaid: the Kanto earthquake, in this account, marked a turning point after which Japan “turned to evil.”

Stone lions and a bell that survive in Yokohama

Two Chinese relics remain in Yokohama’s Yokohama-cho Park: a pair of stone lions and a “Netherworld Bell.” The lions stand at the entrance to the park’s main hall, the Ireido, and the inscription “Respectfully donated by Wang Yintai” is still faintly legible on the base after a century of weather. The bell was planned and cast at the initiative of the painter Wang Yiting and shipped to Japan to pray for peace and mourn the earthquake’s dead.

On September 1, 2023, the earthquake’s centenary, descendants of Wang Yiting’s family gathered at Yokohama-cho Park from around the world and rang the “Bell of Peace and Friendship” with Chinese and Japanese friends. The scene became a much-cited example of friendship between ordinary people in the two countries.

From disaster to massacre

Post-earthquake Japan did not move toward peace. With order collapsing in Tokyo, rumors spread that Koreans were setting fires, poisoning wells and rioting. Encouraged by far-right military police and civilian “vigilante” groups, thousands of innocent Koreans — and some Chinese laborers — were hunted down and killed. A modest stone monument in a corner of the park, the memorial to Koreans killed in the Kanto earthquake, quietly records that bloody episode.

The natural disaster became a slaughter of vulnerable minorities and a symbol of the collapse of Japan’s “Taisho democracy.” Before the earthquake, Japan had won the Russo-Japanese War but carried a heavy financial burden and sharp social tensions. After it, militarism gathered pace and eventually drove Japan onto the path of aggressive war.

A distorted memory

In 1945, U.S. incendiary bombing raids on Tokyo — the “LeMay firebombing” — killed tens of thousands of civilians. Japanese society remembers the suffering of the air raids vividly. But a memory that holds only one’s own suffering while deliberately downplaying how the war came about is distorted and incomplete.

The Kanto earthquake, the memorial to the Korean victims and the Tokyo air raids, taken together, form a bitterly ironic loop in modern Japanese history. Chinese generosity in the face of disaster stands in sharp contrast to Japan’s later atrocities against its neighbors. Kindness is valuable, but the lesson of history matters more: reflection on disaster should not stop at