To the growing corpus of English-language monographs on Japan's experience of major earthquakes in its history—including scholarship by Gregory Clancey, Gennifer S. Weisenfeld, and Charles J. Schencking that could in any other circumstance be called “ground-breaking”—there is a valuable new addition. Seismic Japan, by Gregory Smits, is particularly welcome because it focuses on a pre-1868 event, the Ansei Edo earthquake of 1855. In this broad-ranging book, Smits moves effortlessly between different levels of analysis and subfields of history: he contextualizes Ansei in Japanese domestic and international politics of the mid-1850s and in the wider intellectual history of earthquakes in early modern Japan, while also looking forward to Ansei's legacy into the 1860s and, at times, even to today. The resulting work is sophisticated, enlightening, constantly thought-provoking, and not least an elegant read.

At Seismic Japan’s epicenter is an excellent social history of the earthquake itself. Smits shows how the popular assumption that Ansei disproportionately affected the commoners living in Edo's lowlands, while not entirely untrue, is based on a seismological misreading of the event. The death rate in the privileged “Daimyo Lane” was significant, for example, while some commoner lowland areas, especially between today's Nihonbashi and Kyōbashi, suffered only “modest damage” (p. 108). This was because the former area was built on the unstable foundation of Hibiya Cove, reclaimed after 1603 to become prime real estate east of the shogun's palace, while the latter was the much more solid Edo Maejima, previously an outcrop into Edo Bay. In other words, Ansei was a “soil base disaster” (p. 105) in which “[i]t was as if the 1855 earthquake shook the boundaries of an older, forgotten Edo back into sight, tracing the contours of pre-bakufu times via dramatically differing patterns of destruction” (p. 110).

For all this shaking, the bakufu's handling of the disaster was remarkably efficient, especially by the standards of the time, with widespread food aid that at times was effectively “large-scale poverty relief under the banner of earthquake relief” (p. 130). There was “a strong spirit of mutual assistance” (p. 135), with townspeople who were unable to contribute money offering instead food, straw mats, towels, and even free haircuts to those worst affected. There was little rioting or looting, and indeed because “Edo was in effect a company town, with the bakufu as the source of people's livelihood” (p. 141), the earthquake was not simply seen as a rebuke to shogunal government. Though Smits does not propose the link, all of these elements seem to support Daniel P. Aldrich's thesis, based partly on his study of the Great Kanto (1923) and Kobe (1995) earthquakes, that communities with strong social networks are better able to coordinate recovery efforts after major disasters.Footnote ¹³

And yet, despite speedy recovery and even a “carnivalesque” (p. 176) celebration of short-term wealth redistribution, the Ansei Edo earthquake shook the bakufu to its core. The permanent destruction of Edo's five offshore batteries (o-daiba), hastily erected after Commodore Perry's 1853 arrival, highlighted a key weakness in the shogunate's very raison d’être as military protector of the realm. Another medium-term consequence of the earthquake, due in no small part to the damage on Daimyo Lane, was a slow loosening of the daimyos' ties to the shogunate, a precursor to the full relaxation of alternate attendance in 1862. In these ways and others, Smits suggests, Ansei “conditioned Edo society for major change” (p. 140). Moreover, 1855 was an okagedoshi, a year of heightened religious fervor and mass pilgrimages to Ise shrine. In this context, popular depictions of Amaterasu arriving in Edo to restore order to a space previously protected by Kashima could be read as the emperor's deity eclipsing one associated with the bakufu. This, then, was a “cosmic dress rehearsal” (p. 161) for the next okage of 1867–68, when of course the bakufu would fall. Here, Smits advances the important argument that earthquakes in the early modern era “reinforced the idea of Japan as a temporal and spatial entity” (p. 3), as seen in the reassuring post-disaster trope of shinkoku (country of deities), which he traces in detail.

A short review does not do justice to the intellectual ambition of Seismic Japan. It is, though it modestly does not claim to be, a valuable contribution to both the history of science in Japan and our transcultural understanding of the Tokugawa period (as seen in pre-Ansei understandings of earthquakes, which drew on Buddhist, Chinese, and Aristotelian thought). It also traces a post-1855 intensification of the iconographic relationship between catfish and earthquakes, including the new idea that catfish could indeed be used to predict the ground shaking—one that merited taxpayer-funded government research between 1977 and 1993, and that was once again popularly referenced after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Seismic Japan is a book that draws deeply on Japanese primary and secondary sources, and in throwing new light on the crises of Bakumatsu Japan, deserves to be read carefully and widely.