Fri, Sep 24, 1999 page13

• Aged survivor jolts collective memory of Tokyo's fatal day

  While memories of Japan's Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 have faded, the remnant of survivors from the inferno and the hot wind gusts that consumed the stricken city in its aftermath are striving to convey the horror of the disaster for posterity

  • ASAHI NEWS SERVICE
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  Seventy-six years ago, on Sept. 1, some 40,000 people who had fled fires sparked by the Great Kanto Earthquake sought refuge on a 60,000-square-meter vacant lot in Yokoami. The site, in Tokyo's Sumida district, had once been occupied by an army clothing depot. About 38,000 people were engulfed by flames and suffocated by blasts of hot air.

  Survivors of the killer quake banded together 28 years ago to hand their experience down to the younger generations so that they could understand and learn from it. At its height, the group managed to attract 70 members.

  "But aging members died one after another and now there are so few of us we're no longer functioning as a group,'' exclaimed one of the few current survivors, Bensaku Morita, 92, with a sad smile.

  The site of the former army clothing depot is now Yokoamicho Park. The ashes of some 58,000 victims of the earthquake whose identities could not be confirmed are preserved in a memorial hall built there in 1930.

  Every year, on Sept. 1, a commemorative service is held in their honor. Even today, many people visit the hall on the anniversary to pay their respects.

  "At the time, it was a vacant lot with no trees or grass,'' Morita recalled.

  Morita was a live-in apprentice at a jewelry workshop about 400 meters north of the former clothing depot. Around 1pm, an hour or so after the quake struck, he sought refuge there with nine other people, including the shop-owner and his family.

  According to Morita, when he got there the lot was half-filled with evacuees and pieces of furniture, futon and as much clothing as those who had salvaged it could carry around or transport on carts.

  Morita made several trips back to the shop to retrieve what he could. All the while, quake victims kept flocking to the vacant lot, which was getting more and more crowded. A fire was approaching from the south.

  Around 4pm, the sky became suddenly dark. No sooner did a strong southerly start blowing than the open space was engulfed in flames. Not only was it searingly hot, but the wind was so strong that breathing was difficult.

  Morita remembers vividly that people were blown through the air like leaves. Tin plates and pebbles rained down from the sky. People were constantly buffeted by scorching wind gusts coming from different directions.

  Morita lay prone as a mass of humanity and objects pounded his back. He dipped his shirt in a puddle and combated the parched atmosphere by holding it to his mouth.

  It took about two hours for the wind to stop. By then, Morita -- his back and buttocks bleeding -- was surrounded by heaps of charred bodies.

  ''I couldn't believe it really happened,'' Morita recalled with horror. ''I couldn't understand why I survived.''

  The phenomenon of those raging hot winds that struck the evacuation site is called a fire-storm, an inferno accompanied by tornado-like whirls of flame and smoke generated by the violent inrush of hot air rising. Historical researchers believe that in the quake's aftermath firestorms, both large and small, erupted at more than 100 locations in Tokyo, Yokohama, Odawara and other stricken zones.

  Estimates of the number of people who died in the Great Kanto Earthquake range from 100,000 up to an official toll of 142,807. About 91,000 are known to have been immolated, many of them in firestorms. A government report released two years after the disaster declared the fires more deadly than the temblor itself.

  The prevailing view then was that the firestorms following the earthquake were created by a weather front that passed over the Kanto region that day. It was believed that whirlwinds, a common enough occurrence when fronts pass through, were intensified by the intensity of the blazes which evolved into firestorms.

  But firestorms were also observed during a massive air raid on Hamburg, Germany, in July 1943, and after an air raid in Wakayama prefecture in July 1945. The Hamburg death toll was about 40,000 people; that in Wakayama, 748. Similar tempests have also been reported during forest fires in the United States.

  Even now, it is not known exactly what causes firestorms. But the prevailing view is that when hot air rises, for instance during the outbreak of an inferno, it undergoes a violent convection -- a massive transfer of heat followed by its expulsion from another location -- even in the absence of peculiar weather conditions.

  In 1979, at the request of the Tokyo metropolitan government, a group of researchers led by Seiji Soma, a former official of the Meteorological Research Institute, part of the Meteorological Agency, conducted an experiment in which a firestorm was induced on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay.

  They poured alcohol into 85 plates forming an L shape 25 meters long and broad. (The vacant lot where the lethal firestorm described earlier struck in 1923 was also L-shaped.) The researchers observed that, 22 minutes after the alcohol was ignited, the wind abated and smoke began to swirl in eddies about 5 meters across.

  The wind gusted to seven meters per second, and hot blasts continued for 30 seconds or thereabouts.

  Soma's group collated their findings in a report on firestorms which they submitted to the earthquake study subcommittee of the Tokyo government's disaster prevention council.

  The report pointed out that seven of the evacuation sites officially designated by the Tokyo government were prone to fire-storms, and called on the government to adopt safety measures. The government treated the report as confidential and its contents were never released.

  Observers say the information was kept secret because some members of the study group objected to its characterization of certain evacuation sites as hazardous.

  The Tokyo government has designated 172 sites as official evacuation centers. Among them are the seven singled out by the report as hazardous.

  The municipality does not consider the firestorm risk when nominating evacuation sites. Instead it is influenced by "past experience'' that firestorms have not followed major quakes since the great Kanto disaster, such as the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe.

  It also believes that devastating fires are less likely to occur now that Tokyo has more concrete buildings than before.

  But Yoshiteru Murosaki, a Kobe University professor who studied the fires that followed the Great Hanshin Earthquake, regards such thinking as reckless.

  "No severe firestorms occurred (after the Great Hanshin Earthquake) and only 7,600 buildings burned down -- but only because weather conditions were favorable and there was hardly any wind,'' Murosaki says.

  Had strong winds sprung up a little later, the entire area stretching from Nishinomiya to Kobe might have gone up in flames, he adds.

  "Actually, many small twisters occurred. It was pure chance that a big firestorm did not break out. That's no reason to assume it never will again.''

  According to a Tokyo government estimate released in 1997, a death toll of 7,200 people could be expected if Tokyo were at the epicenter of an earthquake, and about 4,700 of them would be burned alive. An estimated 380,000 buildings would be razed, a loss on a similar scale to the number of dwellings burned down in the immediate aftermath of the great Kanto calamity.

  Morita has compiled his personal experiences of the 1923 firestorm in a handmade book, and has been distributing copies -- more than 150 so far -- to people who were ignorant of the Great Kanto Earthquake.

  He looks upon it as his duty not to let people forget about the tragedy that befell his world 76 years ago "because I know fire-storms can strike again.''
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