Another shock came after a few minutes, followed by a third one ten minutes later. Parts of the wharf were further dislodged and landed on the floundering people below. The sailors were now hauling up unconscious victims, and quite a few already dead from injuries and drowning. Assisting the rescue, Charles took glances inshore to the city. After the first earthquake, a fine yellow cloud had risen over all of Yokohama. Minute by minute this cloud intensified in colour, turning to a dirty brown and seemed to spread northwards, towards Tokyo. He later realised that this first yellow cloud was the dust shaken loose from collapsing buildings.
After the onlookers had been fished from the water, Charles hauled himself up the jerking gangway of the liner, and from the height of its afterdecks looked out over the city. Nearby, the long brick customs sheds had collapsed. In town, the shape of several familiar buildings had changed. Fires had broken out in several parts of the low-lying city. On the hills beyond, houses were ablaze. The sky darkened with black, grey and brown swirls of smoke. The sun became a red ball, as though seen through a beer-bottle. The wind rose as the typhoon moved closer. By early afternoon it was blowing at gale force from the south. The smoke from the fires merged into one great pall. Crowds of people had congregated near the water’s edge at the bund. In the inner harbour, ships were swinging on their anchor chains with the gusting wind.
Timber lighters that had been unloading logs and sawn planks from American and Canadian cargo ships broke loose and caught fire from flying embers. Out of control and careering around the harbour with the wind shifts, they became blazing fire-ships, bouncing off jetties and vessels. The surface of the water was littered with loose and half-sunken smaller boats, as well as planks, bales of cotton, tea-chests and ship’s gangways, all floating in an oily scum from ruptured tanks. Several sections of the breakwater had disappeared, but the harbour entrance looked clear. Ships’ funnels were piling out smoke as their engineers raised steam so as to escape to open water.
The London Maru made the first attempt, but was swung by the wind into the stern of a Blue Funnel liner, the Lycaon, with a shower of sparks and a grinding noise they could hear on the Empress. The Japanese ship then swung against the Philoctetes, with a timber lighter cushioning the collision. Fortunately, the London Maru managed to steer itself past the breakwater to a safer anchorage, followed by a procession of the larger ships in the harbour. The Empress remained at the wharf, as one of its propellers was tangled by the mooring line of another ship.
By late afternoon, the fires in town had spread down to the seafront. The Grand Hotel, the Union Club, the Yokohama Specie Bank, the City Hall and the railway station could be seen with boiling flames erupting from their windows. Across the water came the screams of fleeing people. Those on the Empress of Australia could see many jumping into the sea from the bund and trying to swim away from the shore.
The ship’s captain decided to lower the lifeboats on the harbour side, and Charles volunteered to help man the oars. They pulled away from the ship’s side and rowed the heavy boat across towards the bund. Showers of cinders fell, sometimes scorching their hair, and as they neared the town waves of heat hit them as if from a radiator.
The oily water was full of inert bodies. They left them and concentred on the survivors who were clinging to timber and other wreckage, waving feebly. They took several boatloads back to the Empress, where sailors heaved them up the gangplank to a dining room cleared as a relief station.
The summer evening grew dark early under the smoke-laden sky. Then a ghastly red glow prevailed. The wind died, and the view across the bay opened. To the north, the shoreline was marked by a string of fires, culminating in a massive zone of red and yellow where Tokyo should be.
Following the immediate rescue calls from the emergency in the harbour, Charles began thinking about how to get back to his family in Yokosuka. Their little house was isolated from its neighbours and close to a thicket of tall green bamboo. If Naka, the baby and the maid had avoided any falling beams or debris, and the cooking fire had not spilled, there was a good chance of their surviving, with some remaining shelter. The older boys had gone out into the countryside on a school excursion. Charles was anxious, but hopeful that they were all safe.
It was unlikely that the railway was still operating. In fact, it was blocked by a collapsed tunnel and the rail-bed was distorted, as they learnt the next day. The firestorm in the town presented a virtually impassable obstacle to walking home. Fortunately, a navy launch that had come down to reconnoitre the damage in Yokohama was heading back to Yokosuka that evening. One of the petty officers let Charles aboard among a group of refugees and they arrived in the early hours of the morning. An oil tank was burning, and navy ratings were manning pumps and playing hoses on the smouldering ruins of several godowns. A crane had collapsed across one warship. Several fires were burning in the town, and at isolated spots in the hills inland.
The journey home required several diversions around burning neighbourhoods. Police patrols and groups of vigilantes looked at Charles suspiciously, and he had to explain his intentions several times. Their house was still standing, but parts of the metal roof had broken and sections of the walls were gone. Inside was a litter of scattered utensils, jars of food, clothing and bedding. He found a note from Naka, saying that she and Edward were uninjured and were setting off inland to find refuge.
Charles pulled together some bedding, lay down under a door lintel for safety, and fell into an immediate sleep. The next morning, surveying the damage, Charles learnt that many of the neighbouring houses had burnt down, as lunches were being cooked when the earthquake struck and the cooking fires were scattered. Charles invited the representatives of two families, whom he found picking through the ruins for any retrievable items, to share their house and asked them to keep guard while he looked for Naka.
Late in the morning he found her holding the baby, sitting in a crowd of refugees under big trees in the grounds of a temple. Despite the continuing aftershocks they returned home. For the next several nights they slept out in the open. In the following days Charles made what repairs he could to the house and straightened the roofing iron. Most of their possessions were intact, including his beloved collection of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and other classics, and they had just bought a large sack of rice.
In town, farmers from outlying villages had begun selling produce on the pavements, but there was little fish to be had. A navy officer Charles bumped into, one of his English students, told him a tidal wave had swept the coast of the Miura peninsula, devastating many fishing villages and holiday resorts.
There was little news from Tokyo. The telegraph wires were down, and the war and navy ministry radio stations were not responding. But the first refugees were reporting that most of the government ministries, the department stores of the Ginza, Tokyo railway station and many other main buildings had been destroyed in a massive fire. A chemical laboratory had ‘exploded’ at the Imperial University, while a ‘mountainous’ tsunami had swept up the Sumida River and drowned the low-lying shitamachi, the remaining old Edo district.
Much of this turned out to be wild exaggeration. But a couple of ministries had indeed burnt down and the big shops of the Ginza were gone. There had been only a ripple of a tsunami, but the beloved shitamachi had been razed. Even two days later, soldiers were blowing up houses to create fire-breaks.
Among the tens of thousands dead were some 30,000 people who had sheltered in the military clothing store compound and died of suffocation and radiant heat in the firestorm. Thousands of factory girls had died in collapsed buildings. Nearly all the painted courtesans and prostitutes of the Yoshiwara had perished in their cages.
Around Yokosuka, the smell of smoke was replaced by the smell of death, from the half-burnt corpses of people trapped inside buildings. There were fresh bodies in the streets too. Charles saw one group from the official youth association frog-marching a terrified, struggling
man around a corner. ‘Korean saboteur,’ he heard one of the vigilantes say.
Over the next few days, many of their neighbours said Korean revolutionaries were taking advantage of the disaster to stir up sedition, assassinate leaders, plant bombs and light fires. One of the Tokyo newspapers reported that martial law troops had been given orders to bayonet any Koreans engaging in ‘malign’ activities.
But the mobs had taken the task on themselves, rounding up any Koreans they could find, and not a few Chinese as well, and putting them to death with sticks and old swords. Charles came across one gang of vigilantes, drunk with self importance and probably looted liquor, who made him stop and look at the bloodied bodies of their victims.
Three days after the earthquake the Tokyo police board issued a mild public rebuke, noting that several cases of ‘Korean rogues’ engaging in riotous acts had been met with the scrupulous vigilance of the authorities, but some citizens were continuing to persecute Koreans without due reason.
The feeble official response did nothing much to halt the pogrom, and two days later the cabinet issued an agonised condemnation, noting that the violence was against the policy of assimilation of Koreans and further, would ‘bring blemish on our honour when reported abroad’.
Several thousand Koreans were taken into protective camps at the Meguro racecourse by the army, but by then 6000 had already been killed by squads from the young men’s association, the veterans’ movement and the fire brigades.
There were other, more calculated atrocities. Four days after the earthquake, the police at Kameido in Tokyo detained trade union leaders and some known radicals. Nine of them were handed over to the military police, the Kempeitai, who took them off and killed them.
Nearly three weeks after the disaster, there was a cryptic announcement from the War Ministry that the general in charge of the Kempeitai and his colonel in charge of the Tokyo region had been suspended from duty. Then a court martial was announced for a Kempeitai captain named Amakasu Masahiko and a subordinate over the deaths of Osugi Sakae ‘and two others’ at a ‘certain place’.
Osugi was by then Japan’s best-known anarchist. Charles had known him since the days he’d hung around the Heiminsha, or Commoner’s Society, back in his Waseda days. Osugi had been an engaging figure, with an endearing stutter that disappeared when he took to the stage, a firebrand ever willing to speak on and wave the red banner when police were trying to shut down meetings. More recently, he had turned up to some of the New Man Society gatherings, along with his mistress Ito Noe, a tempestuous bluestocking. They were surrounded by an aura of scandal from their history of adulterous passion, a near-fatal stabbing by Osugi’s former wife, and his advocacy of free love.
The details came out reluctantly from the War Ministry. Captain Amakasu had taken it upon himself, or so it was said, to eliminate Osugi as a threat to the Imperial order. The ‘two others’ were Ito, his mistress, and Osugi’s six-year-old nephew, Munekazu.
Over the following three months, the public learnt the horrible details from the press reports on the court martial. Amakasu had brought in the three to the Kempeitai offices and put them in separate rooms. Osugi had been brought for interrogation first, enraging Amakasu with his calm demeanour and clear answers about his ideology. The Kempeitai officer had then walked around behind Osugi, seized him with a ju-jitsu hold and strangled him. Sergeant-Major Mori Keijiro had helped by holding down Osugi’s thrashing legs. The two officers had then gone into the room where Ito was held and strangled her too. The little boy had heard her cries of resistance and was wailing in terror. Amakasu went in and strangled him quickly. The bodies were dumped in a well and covered with rocks.
For the rest of his life, Charles felt the rage that swept through him when first reading these reports. The incident gave Japan some notoriety, especially when it emerged that the boy Munekazu had been born in Seattle and had a claim to being an American citizen.
But the judgement was relatively mild. Amakasu was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, and his sergeant-major three years. The lengthy statement by the army colonel presiding emphasised that while out of all legality, the crimes were committed out of a mistaken public spirit rather than personal hatred.
Even so, a young army lieutenant in the public gallery jumped up and threw a sandal at the judge, crying out that he ‘lacks understanding of the ancestral spirit’. Amakasu was released within three years and assigned to work with the army in Manchuria.
The earthquake marked another transition that was much closer to home for Charles. When he went into Yokohama after the fire, he found the buildings of Bavier & Co. completely destroyed. He met Sophus Warming, the Danish manager, who told him that many of the 200 employees had been killed or injured when the main factory collapsed. Warming’s chauffeur, waiting outside the office to take him home to lunch, had been crushed in the flattened car. About 20 of the women in the factory also died immediately. He had walked through the night after the earthquake to find his wife and daughter Karin, who were holidaying down at Zushi. The tsunami had rushed through the beachside village; they had stopped themselves being swirled away by clinging to trees. He’d found them camping in a hut up on the hillside, along with other foreign residents. Warming was the first husband to arrive with news about the devastation in Yokohama. The women became frantic with worry about their own husbands. But it was several days before they could get back. After surviving on spring water and scraps of food retrieved from ruined houses, an American destroyer appeared and put its boats in to pick them up. They’d all been brought back to Yokohama by the warship. Some went to camps up on the racecourse at Negishi awaiting evacuation, some went straight to billets on the Empress of Australia, which ferried them down to Kobe.
Bavier & Co. was one of the few firms in Yokohama to have paid the extra insurance premium at Lloyd’s to cover fire resulting from earthquake, and eventually received a full payout. This was used to settle accounts and pension off the surviving staff. The foreign managers returned to their homelands, having lost the assets they had built up in a working life in Japan. The remaining business goodwill was sold to another company, and the firm of Bavier & Co. ceased to exist.
Two years later, there was a small notice in one of the newspapers that Edouard de Bavier had passed away at Dully, survived by his three sons, André, Ernest and Jean. Charles was not mentioned.
Chapter 11
BLIND SAMURAI
Incidents of this sort, arising one after another, were like waves rolling in from a night sea to break upon the beach.
— Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima, about the ‘incident’ on 15 May 1932, in which navy officers assassinated Prime Minister Inukai
Yokohama–Tokyo 1923–36
Soon after Charles had returned to Japan, he had re-contacted his old China revolutionary comrades and gone up to Tokyo to see Miyazaki Tōten. The old China ronin was still convivial but frail and shaken by fits of coughing. The course of the Chinese revolution had deeply disappointed him, as had the clumsiness and arrogance of Japan’s approach, in its Twenty-One Demands in 1915 and its lingering presence in the old German colonies on the Yellow Sea.
Miyazaki watched over the sprawling mansion at Mejiro, not far from Waseda, that had belonged to General Huang Hsing, who had died of illness in 1916. The house had become a hub for students and comrades who were being rallied together by Miyazaki’s son Ryusuke. As a student in the Imperial University in Tokyo, Ryusuke had been a founder of a group called the Shinjinkai or New Man Society, which expressed an optimistic mood of popular and humanistic modernisation. Its membership of young intellectuals had made the Huang mansion their dormitory and meeting house, and invited students from China and Korea to come and put forward their views.
This happy state ended after only a year, just as Charles returned to Japan, when Ryusuke began an affair with a poet named Yanagihara Byakuren, daughter of a cousin of the current e
mperor, Taisho, who had been an ambassador to China. Byakuren or ‘White Lotus’ left her husband, a wealthy coal mine owner in Kyushu, to join Ryusuke. Far from hiding from the scandal, Byakuren then wrote an open letter in a Tokyo newspaper explaining her decision to leave her loveless marriage to a womaniser in order to be with her lover. The husband had published his own version, but Ryusuke and Byakuren became symbols of the era’s new romanticism and individualism.
Ryusuke’s comrades were more disturbed that he had taken up with a woman belonging to both the nobility and the plutocracy, and had expelled him from the Shinjinkai. Miyazaki senior had then withdrawn his hospitality at the Huang mansion, and the New Man Society had moved to meaner premises.
After Miyazaki’s funeral, a year after his return, Charles had gone to some of their meetings but found himself unmoved by their youthful enthusiasm, and aware that his attendance was being noted by police agents mingling in the audiences. So it did not come as a huge surprise to Charles, when shortly after he moved into Naka’s house in Yokosuka and registered their marriage at the town hall, he was visited by two men in shabby suits and hats who had been loitering in the lane outside their house. As soon as the boys went off to school, the men came into the yard and announced themselves loudly as military police.
Showing an authorisation paper, they insisted on a thorough search of the house, and turned over all of Charles’ belongings. They went through his books, but fortunately failed to notice some annotations about tactics in the margins, which might have looked like coded information. Although they could not read or speak English, they set aside several books with military images on the covers. These would have to be taken away for inspection, and would be returned if approved.
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