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<blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9610770" data-attributes="member: 78087">This is not a today thing, but something I learned about a week ago.I’d vaguely heard of the Great Kanto Earthquake in manga etc before, but only read up on it last week. In case you don’t know, the GKE was a massive earthquake which destroyed most of Tokyo and killed 100k people back in 1923. It was generationally traumatic and is partly accounted an influence in making Imperial Japan more nationalist and fascist at that point. Which is bad enough, and quite a lot of trauma for any nation to process, but I hadn’t known about what happened afterwards, which was when mobs murdered 10k people over the next 6 months. The victims were generally outsiders such as ethnic Koreans (some of whom had been brought over as slave labourers), trade unionists, and suffragettes. The mobs were under the mistaken impression in some cases that the victims had poisoned wells or even caused the earthquake. This time is generally known as the Great Kanto Massacre.The GKM also had a profound effect on Japanese culture and society along with the GKE - not only can terrible events outside your control destroy your world, your neighbours can then become barbaric monsters at the drop of a hat afterwards. This explains why there’s such emphasis on accurate information after natural disasters in Japan, and probably contributed to the formation of a collectivist culture where nobody rocks the boat if at all possible. An exercise to the reader might be to compare this to the effect of the Wall Street crash in 1929 on America and how that shaped the individualist culture of that country.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="jian, post: 9610770, member: 78087"] This is not a today thing, but something I learned about a week ago. I’d vaguely heard of the Great Kanto Earthquake in manga etc before, but only read up on it last week. In case you don’t know, the GKE was a massive earthquake which destroyed most of Tokyo and killed 100k people back in 1923. It was generationally traumatic and is partly accounted an influence in making Imperial Japan more nationalist and fascist at that point. Which is bad enough, and quite a lot of trauma for any nation to process, but I hadn’t known about what happened afterwards, which was when mobs murdered 10k people over the next 6 months. The victims were generally outsiders such as ethnic Koreans (some of whom had been brought over as slave labourers), trade unionists, and suffragettes. The mobs were under the mistaken impression in some cases that the victims had poisoned wells or even caused the earthquake. This time is generally known as the Great Kanto Massacre. The GKM also had a profound effect on Japanese culture and society along with the GKE - not only can terrible events outside your control destroy your world, your neighbours can then become barbaric monsters at the drop of a hat afterwards. This explains why there’s such emphasis on accurate information after natural disasters in Japan, and probably contributed to the formation of a collectivist culture where nobody rocks the boat if at all possible. An exercise to the reader might be to compare this to the effect of the Wall Street crash in 1929 on America and how that shaped the individualist culture of that country. [/QUOTE]

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