Japan’s Great Kanto Earthquake kills over 140,000

Japan’s Great Kanto Earthquake kills over 140,000

On September 1, 1923, a routine lunch hour in Japan's capital city of Tokyo and neighboring “City of Silk” Yokohama is disrupted when a massive, 7.9-magnitude earthquake strikes just before noon. The shaking causes more than half of Tokyo’s brick buildings, most of Yokohama’s buildings, and hundreds of thousands of homes to collapse, killing tens of thousands of people.

The Great Kanto Earthquake, also called the Tokyo-Yokohama Earthquake, of 1923 caused an estimated death toll of more than 140,000 and made some 1.5 million people homeless, though reported numbers vary. The earthquake triggered fires that burned many buildings, likely because in 1923, people cooked over an open flame, and the quake struck while people were preparing lunch. The high winds after the hit, caused by a typhoon that passed off the coast of the Noto Peninsula in northern Japan, spread the flames and created horrifying firestorms. Since the earthquake snapped water mains, the fires were not extinguished until September 3, after about 45 percent of Tokyo burned. Some researchers believed that the typhoon may have triggered the earthquake, because the forced atmospheric pressure pressed on a stressed and delicate fault line of three major tectonic plates that meet under Tokyo.

The shock also triggered a tsunami that swelled to 39.5 feet at Atami on Sagami Gulf, then killed 60 people and destroyed 155 homes.