The term hijōji or hijō no toki (emergency, or literally “extraordinary time”) first became etched into Japanese consciousness following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923. Hirohito, then Regent to the Taisho Emperor, broached the concept in a public statement of 12 September: “since natural disasters are difficult to control with human power, there is only one thing we can do: to quickly recruit men in order to settle the hearts of the masses. At the time of emergency (hijō no toki) extraordinary actions are required” (Yoshikawa Reference Mitsusada1949, 4). The earthquake brought massive destruction to the capital and the deaths of more than a hundred thousand, followed by the spread of vicious rumors about Japanese Koreans and socialist activists, and accompanying massacres. Hirohito's invocation of emergency was accompanied by the advice that politicians remain composed in making decisions, just as in heiji (ordinary times). Few could have realized it then, but “ordinary times” or “settled hearts” as a description for any imagined state of Japanese existence was already an anachronism. The phrases hijōji or hijō no toki were subsequently used widely in the writings of state and right-wing intellectuals who supported the revival of imperial and military power. By the early 1930s, writers and propagandists across all political spectrums acknowledged that they now lived in a Hijōji Nippon (emergency Japan), though few dwelled on its origins or agreed on its precise definition.

In Japanese and foreign scholarship alike, the Showa Restoration of the 1920s-30s and the accompanying rise of militarism rarely takes the destruction of the national capital as a starting point.Footnote ¹ There is, after all, a general discomfort in historical writing with extending agency to crises of nature (as opposed to crises of politics, economy, and/or society that are manifested in nature), which are often approached as “time-outs” in social and political gamesmanship.Footnote ² Mainstream historical scholarship locates the origin of the Japanese state of emergency of the 1930s in such events as the May 15 Incident of 1932 and the withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 (e.g., Wilson Reference Wilson2002, 63–67).Footnote ³ Yet much of the emergency language activated in the 1930s was produced by right-wing officials and intellectuals in the aftermath of the 1923 earthquake, a discourse which was not only unprecedented, but would provide an important ideological resource into the following decade and beyond. Intellectual and popular responses to the natural disaster opened a new front in conservatives’ attacks on the Left by substituting a language of speed, urgency, and millenarianism for the slow, measured, and often tedious language associated with constitutional reform, scientific inquiry, and economic planning. Arising initially from post-apocalyptic Tokyo, Hijōji Nippon would eventually be characterized by terrorism, coup d'etat, disastrous foreign wars, and ultimately Tokyo's second, less natural, reduction to physical ruin.

Those who most consistently deployed this novel language of emergency described the Great Kanto Earthquake as a test from Heaven, and one needful of being passed on the way to a better life. Given that Japan is one of the most seismic nations on earth (and also prone to fires, typhoons, landslides, and floods) the history, popular sayings, and traditional perceptions of violent nature (which also found sources in folk and Buddhist traditions) were liberally drawn on by the Right in preaching moral lessons and unity, and denying excessive materialism and individualism. This discourse asked for allegiance by provoking fear, but also spread the promise of a better future. There was some initial convergence in post-disaster discourse between the language and imagery of the Right and that of the Center – for example, the “Regeneration Plans” proposed for Tokyo after the earthquake would resonate with a range of Japanese reformers and revolutionaries in the 1930s – but while the sense of emergency would eventually drop away for many political players, it would remain vital to conservatives and radical nationalists. For them there was no clear divide between the natural and political crises, which would come to be framed as a near-continuous emergency, and one presenting a personal, and ultimately spiritual challenge to every Japanese.

The Japanese rhetoric of emergency drew on both nativist and internationalist sources. Some of it was excavated from historical and mytho-historical material, particularly Nichirenism, which counted such infamous Rightist intellectuals as Kita Ikki and Ishiwara Kanji among its followers. On the other hand, the 1920s was the first and arguably most crucial decade in the development of a global discourse of emergency, which hijōji translated and domesticated. Both in its local and international manifestations, moreover, the concept was bound up with events of nature as much as shifts in society, the economy, or politics. In Japan, perhaps uniquely, it also shaded into the supernatural. This convergence indeed proved crucial to giving the new twentieth-century state of emergency its particular charisma, one it continues to carry today.

The Japan of the 1920s, and particularly Tokyo, was of course a “center of calculation” with a well-developed scientific community, and a reading public that readily consumed scientific as well as political and religious tracts. Japan's seismologists, whom one of us has discussed at length elsewhere, were among the most numerous, most sophisticated, and most respected in the world in the years and moments before the destruction of Tokyo in 1923, an event which nonetheless shook their community to its core. Meiji and Taisho era science had managed to vanquish to a remarkable extent “popular superstitions” about seismicity – such as those describing earthquakes as the movements of a giant catfish – even as it cautiously subjected certain others (e.g. the relationship of earthquakes to weather, or animals’ responses to seismic vibrations) to cautious scientific investigation. But Japanese science had not decisively encountered – let alone taken on – millenarian beliefs related to certain long-dormant strains of Buddhism, which would become resurgent in the aftermath of Tokyo's destruction. These beliefs, as inchoate and “irrational” as they would have appeared to Japan's earth scientists and many other thinking persons, came too late and too strongly to be effectively countered, and would contribute to sweeping away – temporarily – much of the epistemological legacy that Meiji and Taisho science had worked so hard to construct.Footnote ⁴

Toward a History of Emergency

Although emergency was among the prominent keywords of the twentieth century (and it seems the early twenty-first century as well) we know relatively little about how it came to prominence or why.Footnote ⁵ In the past decade, philosophers and legal scholars have taken up the problem of the exception to the rule of law, following the work of Georgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, a matter that seemed particularly pressing in the context of the contemporary war on terror. As important and topical as this discussion is, it has not been deeply informed by historical studies, and the examples it references thus tend to cluster around a few iconic sites – Imperial Rome, The Third Reich, Guantanamo Bay, etc. Perhaps for this reason, philosophical and legal discussions about states of emergency have tended to be more vigorous than political, social, or economic ones, a condition noted, and even lamented by some of those at the center of the present discussion.Footnote ⁶

We might begin to untangle the historical problem that emergency presents by cleaving more closely to the word itself, rather than starting with the conditions it is assumed to describe – i.e., the state of exception. In other words, by tracing emergency as a discursive and conceptual object that arose at a specific point in time, and as a result of specific series of events, we might arrive at a fuller sense of how and under what circumstances it came to be deployed across a range of interlocking domains. Much legal and philosophical scholarship presumes that authors know an emergency or exception when they see one – and that the two words are interchangeable – regardless of the language used at the time by participants or observers. This has the result of projecting a difficult and nuanced word into periods and spaces (and applying it generously to many documents, incidents, and situations) where it would have been peculiar to historical actors.

If legal scholars and philosophers have been overly casual in applying the term emergency to their cases, however, historians have not helped by under-reporting its occurrence – either ignoring its frequency in the historical record or substituting their own synonyms. In histories of the United States during the 1930s for example, the word emergency is often casually clipped from the long titles of New Deal agencies (where it was ubiquitous), and terms like The Great Depression are substituted whenever possible for contemporary descriptors like The Economic Emergency. In the Japanese case too, the frequent use of hijōji in the same period tends to be under-reported in historical accounts, or the word is translated into crisis or other more general (and generally older) synonyms. Thus does the term appear like a phantom in the historical record, darting around the periphery of many research projects but rarely a subject of analysis in its own right.

Though the contemporary politics of the word are ambiguous, historically it was more often associated with the Right (i.e. as a condition of reaction to the Left's emergence). In one sense, emergency seems fundamentally related to the creation and projection of fear – the socio-political equivalent of fight or flight – though the word is ultimately more complicated in the work that it does. The declaration of a state of emergency mixes a concession of weakness (or at least limitation of vision) with a will toward action. In that sense the emergency differs, at least at its point of origin, from the eighteenth-century state of the sublime, which held one helpless and in awe before the potentially destructive power of an Almighty God(s). Emergency by contrast creates an actionable space – one in which dangerous events are presumed to be occurring, but can theoretically be reversed. It likely came to popularity in the realms of twentieth-century politics and journalism not least because of its seemingly progressive tendencies, and arguably stands at the boundary between progress and fear, a liminal space convergent with many twentieth-century projects and stances.

Yet just as the sublime was simultaneously a state of politics and nature (and, at their junction, aesthetics) so the more actionable and modern state of emergency gained power and substance by mediating across those same realms. Contemporary legal and political writings about emergency nearly always neglect the emergency of nature, as though it were an epiphenomenon of the emergency of state. The emergency of health, in the form of epidemic diseases and their control, is slightly more visible in contemporary writings if only because of the existence of public health bureaucracies in modern states. Indeed, late twentieth century science seems to have accommodated itself to the realm of emergency – from the relations of physics with nuclear weapons, to climatology with global warming, to microbiology with pandemics, etc. – a condition under-remarked in histories and social studies of the sciences. Missing on a more fundamental level, however, is a sense of when, how, and why the term/concept emerged at the nexus of these domains, transcending them all while re-producing each in turn.

Nature, and more specifically natural disaster, may be the missing puzzle-piece which promises to make our picture of modern emergency whole. Rather than being an epiphenomenon or second-order application, the emergency of nature has marbled through and informed the modern politics of emergency from its early twentieth-century beginnings, and more fundamentally than most social science literature allows. The modern state of emergency was at its point of origin a new politics of landscape, in which natural and political environments were made to explicitly converge or link, giving the term a power nearly akin to history, technology, modernity, and other better-studied twentieth-century keywords. And it is here that the sublime in the form of natural catastrophe, or more specifically the catastrophic event, had its part to play in creating a deeply compelling vista. In few places was that vista more compelling, or politically actionable, than in Late Imperial Japan.

Post-Seismic Utopianism: Tokyo, 1923

Tokyo's sudden and unexpected destruction in late 1923 occurred in the midst of a partial political vacuum: Prime Minister Katō Tomosaburō's death a week before the Great Kanto Earthquake left the government leaderless while his eventual successor was still forming a cabinet. On the morning after the quake the Minister of Foreign Affairs (who was appointed provisional prime minister) thus issued a Hijō chōhatsurei (Emergency Conscript Law) and established special headquarters. The capital also came under the jurisdiction of kaigenrei, or martial law specially decreed by the emperor. It was only the second time that had happened since the adoption of the Meiji Constitution, the first following the Hibiya Incendiary Incident of 1905. The third time this would happen would be in the aftermath of a coup attempt, the so-called Feb. 26 Incident of 1936 (Matsuo et al. Reference Shōichi, Yoneko and Chieko1997 and Matsuo Reference Shōichi2003; Nakajima Reference Yōichirō1982, 24, 44; Yoshikawa Reference Mitsusada1949, 1).Footnote ⁷ Minobe Tatsukichi, a legal scholar famous for his theory of the emperor-as-organ (of the state), explained the necessity of martial law by drawing on the German scholar Carl Schmitt's state of exception. He wrote, “[The earthquake] has brought about the need to mobilize military power for maintaining social peace. . . .[because] we are under the condition, Ausnahmezustand” (Minobe Reference Tatsukichi1923, 11). From the beginning, in other words, the earthquake was infused with political qualities.

The new Yamamoto cabinet was rushed into place by the evening of 2 September, the same day that Tokyo's Korean population began to be targeted by rumor-mongers. By the fourth day, Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba in addition to Tokyo were all designated as martial regions, where the army closely policed the survivors. Vigilante groups nonetheless formed and began attacking the Korean population, while socialists and anarchist Ōsugi Sakae and his family were singled out for arrest and assassination by elements of the police. Some left-leaning publications were also banned for the duration of martial law (Nakajima Reference Yōichirō1982, 25; Yoshikawa Reference Mitsusada1949, 2). On 5 September, Prime Minister Yamamoto announced the following:

Thus did the natural catastrophe quickly become a crisis of social control, an age-old condition in Japanese disaster zones.

As in all such situations from the mid-Meiji period onward, the press and public turned to scientists to help explain the disaster. This time, however, the science with the greatest claim to authority and explanation – seismology – had been shaken to its foundations. As Kerry Smith has discussed, seismologist Imamura Akitsune became something of a celebrity as he pinpointed the earthquake's epicenter and performed other necessary rituals for Japan's press corps. But Imamura's “scientific voice” was hardly detached from the trauma of the event. He described to reporters not only how his seismological lab at Tokyo University had literally collapsed around him, and how he personally fought the fires that burned through decades of scientific records, but went on to expose the long-standing professional struggle between himself and his mentor, Prof. Ōmori Fusakichi, over the likelihood and timing of the Great Kanto Earthquake. Tokyo's destruction vindicated the theories of Imamura (who had predicted it, but been ignored) while so tarnishing the reputation of senior scientist Ōmori (who had declared the city safe for additional decades) that the latter would die of “natural causes” before the dust of the catastrophe had fully settled. Japanese seismology would eventually recover, but for a time at least, the authority of science, which had increased steadily if not exponentially with every previous earthquake, tsunami, and volcanic eruption, seemed in abeyance (Smith Reference Smith2006). Prediction – the ultimate instrumental goal of Japanese seismology, and the reason it had been so lavishly funded by the state, had failed to save the capital.

Within a week of the disaster, and despite the continued impact of the destruction, print reactions began to extend their range beyond the traumatized and tragic, and the search for scientific explanations, to include the optimistic and even euphoric, the latter condition being referred to in some disaster-studies writings as “post-disaster utopianism.” The expression konosai dakara. . ., which means “On this occasion. . .” or “Now that it happened. . .” and followed by some generally positive statement, became common in print sources and apparently in daily speech, suggesting a reformist readiness to accept accelerated changes rather than return to the past (Minami Reference Hiroshi1965, 355). Those who had been antipathetic about the rise of capitalism particularly appreciated the earthquake for destroying its symbols and breaking down the walls between social classes.Footnote ⁸ Likewise, those who perceived the disaster as a judgment on the “perversion” of materialism felt enthusiastic about undertaking the political task of remaking history.Footnote ⁹ In previous “regional” earthquakes the voices of government figures and scientists (most located in Tokyo) had largely dominated the search for meaning, challenged only by the woodblock artists and photographers who created sometimes vivid counter-narratives. But this time the disaster site was the national capital and primate city, and a myriad of insistent and articulate voices would vie to control the conversation. Among the most insistent would be those of the reformist Right.

Not only right-wing intellectuals, however, but also mainstream elements of the Japanese government wasted little time in grieving over Tokyo's loss. As early as 4 September 1923, a plan to reconstruct the city of Tokyo was drafted by the Home Secretary, Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), and submitted to the council on 6 September.Footnote ¹⁰ In his statement, Gotō stressed fukkō (revival, regeneration), a drastic transformation of Tokyo into a cosmopolitan city, as opposed to fukkyū (retrieval, recovery) (Koshizawa Reference Akira2005, 43).Footnote ¹¹ Gotō's initial proposal to invest three billion yen for the revival of Tokyo was eventually reduced in the face of political opposition, but he was not alone in deploying a utopian rhetoric of total change. While Gotō preferred fukkō over fukkyū, the word shinzō (new creation) was coined as a more energetic replacement for the then-common kaizō (recreation, reform) (Yokoyama Reference Kendō and kai1923, 267). In one popular tract, the reconstruction of the capital was compared to the rebirth of the Phoenix. The disaster “will probably burn down all the past obstacles” wrote the author “and establish the most magnificent city in the West Pacific as well as East Asia to contribute to the civilization of the whole world. The great disaster is the price [we paid] for this [goal]” (Miyake Reference Yūjirō and Kai1923, Prologue).

In the eyes of the Right, however, transforming Tokyo into “the most magnificent city” was bound up with two more fundamental political goals: the suppression of the Left and the acquisition of public consent to conservative rule. Justification was provided by the influential business leader, Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931), who declared that the earthquake was divine punishment for public moral decline, and employed emergency (hijō) measures to suggest mass introspection and self-reform (Shibusawa Reference Eiichi and kai1923, 275–276; Hori Reference Arata2004). His so-called tenken ron, or “theory of retribution,” became prominent in writings of the period and was strongly supported by right-leaning intellectuals. It was effective because it had origins in Chinese cosmology (the Mandate of Heaven), even though, unlike Chinese emperors, the Emperor Taisho was never blamed in any source for the rumbling of the earth (Tsurumi & Imai et al. Reference Shunsuke and Seiichi1962, 54; Hori Reference Arata2004, 130–131). In 1923 Japan, it was rather the masses who had brought natural disaster upon the realm, and were urged to reflect on their past actions and future responsibilities. It was in this atmosphere that the phrase, “We will refrain from anything luxurious from now on,” famously associated in the post-war period with war-time Japanese society, actually emerged and became popular (Minami Reference Hiroshi1965, 355). Only a few individuals, such as the writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, openly expressed skepticism toward the “theory of retribution” and the emergence of other rightist discourses in the earthquake's immediate aftermath (Akutagawa Reference Ryūnosuke1978, 182–184). Indeed, most mainstream Japanese thinkers did not even protest the murders of Koreans, anarchists, and socialists (Inagaki Reference Tatsurō1982, 427–429).Footnote ¹²

Gen. Fukuda Miyatarō, who was in charge of security in the martial regions, also explicitly combined the retribution theory with invocations of hijōji. Besides the damage caused by the disaster, the activities of socialists and anarchists were seen as a part of hijōji for the Japanese military. Fukuda emphasized that because the military had managed to suppress the Left and restore public order, its bond with the Japanese people had been refreshed, and the now-unified nation was ready to rise to the challenge posed by Heaven.

The state of hijōji was stressed to emphasize the role of the Japanese military, but more importantly, to show that these soldiers, who had only recently been criticized as elitist and even redundant in the Taisho press, were in fact on the people's side. With such statements as “we all start from scratch,” “everybody is equal now,” and “we all stand at the same starting point,” a new harmony between the military and the masses was announced (Wada Reference Kiyoshi1924, 373). The military now emphasized its role of providing safety and security for the population at home rather than just expanding and defending the Empire abroad.

This conformed to a palpable sense on the Right that the earthquake was not an agent of destruction, but one of salvation; that the natural disaster had actually prevented a social and political one of potentially greater magnitude. Masuda Yoshikazu, a powerful businessman and also another supporter of the retribution theory, pointed his finger at socialism and Marxism – the “selfish ideologies” – as responsible for the social corruption which brought about the earthquake (Tsurumi & Imai et al. Reference Shunsuke and Seiichi1962, 54). Mamiya Heizō was more explicit in his article written for a book published by the City of Tokyo at the first commemoration of the event. He stated, “Japan is blessed because the Communist revolution which almost took place was successfully prevented by nature's revolution” (Mamiya Reference Heizō1924, 384). The novelist Murakami Namiroku described the political violence accompanying the earthquake as a godsend for the state:

This discursive drumbeat by the state and military officials caused at least one socialist to confess his sins in the article titled “My Repentance and Awakening after the Earthquake”:

While the military and right-wing intellectuals experimented with fear and guilt to win trust and forge a stronger nationalism, they also sold utopianism. Frequent reference was made to the Japanese popular proverb, “Turn a crisis into a blessing” (wazawai tenjite fuku to nasu). For instance, after expressing “deep gratitude. . .for the tens and thousands of fellow citizens who sacrificed their lives in place of the other seven million Japanese for this divine punishment,” Mikami Sanji argued that the nation must repay their sacrifices by “actively striving to turn this crisis into a blessing.” He said this would be “a truly everlasting memorial gesture for the victims if we worked for a new and honorable epoch after 1923” (Murakami Reference Yōichirō1923, Prologue). The famous Meiji-period novelist Kōda Rohan also claimed that the retribution theory was not a mere expression of “religious sentiments of the old-fashioned and the uneducated” and added, “by learning lessons and coming up with ideas, it will allow us to improve further, lessen our crisis, and increase our blessings” (Kōda Reference Rohan and kai1923, Prologue). The novelist Murakami Namiroku agreed, writing:

In framing the earthquake as a message from Heaven, right-wing intellectuals evoked the traditional Japanese idea of yonaoshi (roughly “world rectification”) to present hope for creating a unified, “peaceful” and ultimately totalitarian world. While Murakami stated, “[We should] redo society (yononaka no yarinaoshi) and restart human lives (ningen no denaoshi)” (ibid., 278), the poet and critic Ōmachi Keigetsu wrote, “[With the earthquake,] our laziness will change. Our arrogance will be restrained. . . .the crisis will become the source of our happiness, as our hearts are reformed and the capital is reconstructed (tatenaoshi).” Not only did the destruction manifest a new beginning for the capital and human morality, but Ōmachi and others saw the disaster as bringing equality between rich and poor. He argued, “There will be no differences between those with money and those without. Any person who is willing to work his best through the course of this unprecedented crisis has met with the opportunity of a lifetime.” He added, “The recovery [from the disaster] will determine the Empire's rise or fall. Everyone must rise . . . as if we were born in this world for the first time” (Ōmachi Reference Keigetsu and kai1923a, 283; idem 1923b, 285).

While the last “great earthquake” to have struck Japan, the Nobi Earthquake of 1891, had also contributed to a wave of popular criticism of the existing order, most graphically in the form of wood-block prints expressing the fragility of western-derived modernity, it was arguably scientists and their patrons in the Japanese state who reaped the greatest benefit from that disaster. While western engineering was widely seen to have failed, Japanese earth science not only filled the breach, but went on to teach lessons to foreign scientists in earthquake zones around the world. The realm of modern rationality was even extended back into time, as Japanese carpenters were described as proto-earthquake-engineers, whose pagodas cleverly resisted seismicity through the use of pendulum. The Nobi plain was far from Tokyo, however, and though the peasants who were that earthquake's major victims may have wrestled with their world-views, both folk and Buddhist, urban elites suffered no crises of consciousness. While some took the opportunity to criticize rural Buddhism for doing too little to assuage victims, millenarian beliefs or visions hardly surfaced in print discussions. Mid-Meiji was, after all, a time when reformist instincts were channeled into institution-building on western models, and accelerated seismicity was also made to serve that purpose, directly contributing to the formation of an internationally prominent Japanese scientific community.Footnote ¹³

In the shattered Tokyo of late 1923, however, seismicity was a much more powerful recruiting tool for the nascent far-right. Kokuryūkai (The Black Dragon Society), a right-wing organization established in 1901 and which infamously contributed its Pan-Asianistic ideology to the militarist milieu of the 1930s, was perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of fundamental social change in the aftermath of the earthquake. One of their writings compared the earthquake to the Christian genesis of the world, declaring “the first day [of the disaster] was a hell” and “the second day was [like] pre-historic time,” just like when “primitive people wandered around the Garden of Eden.” On the third day, the survivors behaved like actual humans again, as they began to ponder about the means of survival. “We received an order from Heaven” it reported “to rebuild and reshape [the society] after being resurrected on the third day.” Although the society was still trapped in a sense of loss and helplessness, people “gradually became filled with hopes and energy. . .Sadness and despair transformed into sheer optimism.” Kokuryūkai believed that Japanese society was penalized by Heaven because “all spheres of society including politics, religion and education were [then] at the height of their corruption. There was no other choice left [for Japan] but to explode after such a social dead-end. That [explosion] was this earthquake.” They continued, “It has been sixty nine years since the great earthquake of the Ansei period. This is almost one person's lifetime. A big, once in a lifetime cleansing was performed on every person, to clean us from defilement” (Kokuryūkai Reference kai1923, 306–308).

Heaven, Kokuryūkai believed, had also performed natural selection, rewarding good citizens while taking everything away from the bad. Thus Japanese society no longer had to fear the “dangerous ideologies,” because “once we have a good state administrative system we do not even need the party system. The bond between the state and citizens, or kyokoku icchi (united country, becoming one), will be formed bringing more social stability and harmony than the time prior to this disaster” (ibid., 309). They were of course wrong about events of the following few years, in which party government temporarily flourished with the expansion of suffrage, but such language would be helpful to their long-term cause.

Going beyond even the “retribution theory,” Kokuryūkai wrote that the earthquake had salvaged the Japanese ethos: “The Japanese people, with their eyes now opened, are in a way very blessed. The destroyed objects can be repaired, but human spirits would have been destroyed [eternally].” Their tracts were also run through with social Darwinism, as when they explained that “although we sympathize with those who lost their lives, [they] failed to pass the test of nature which selected the fittest. . . . So those who are alive, you should feel happy and work hard.” The nation had experienced a re-birth as if through war, to which the earthquake was related: “The people living in the period between Meiji and Taisho are blessed” because “they experienced the Sino-Japanese war, Russo-Japanese war,. . .survived this earthquake in Taisho and witnessed the great power of the natural disaster.” These people are blessed “to live in this period. . .and experience various changes, [because] there was no other period in our history like these forty five years [since the Meiji Restoration].” And later, “Heaven's anger made people earnest, the natural disaster was much better than any potential riots or revolutions” (ibid., 311–315).

By stressing how blessed were the survivors, Kokuryūkai rhetorically enlisted them in the creation of a new post-apocalyptic state. Those who were still despairing and complaining were criticized as weak and lazy, and to further justify the earthquake as the mandate of Heaven, Kokuryūkai made the seismicity of the Japanese landscape into a virtue rather than a burden. Comparing Japan to Korea, where earthquakes were far fewer, they argued that people living in seismic zones tend to be more lively, hard-working, and active. The annexation of Korea was thus “the natural fate” of that country (ibid., 311–312, 315). A language of environmental determinism re-vitalized by natural disaster would emerge more generally in the 1930s with Watsuji Tetsurō's more famous description of Japanese as “typhoon people” (Watsuji Reference Tetsurō1935).

Statements by some military officials shared rhetorical similarities with those of Kokuryūkai. The book Daishinsai to sono kyōkun (The Great Earthquake and Its Moral Lessons) was published in 1923 by the Society for Promoting General Moral Education, an affiliate of the Organization of Military Education. The content had a strong spiritual and nationalistic tone, also interpreting the disaster as Heaven's message to implement new changes in society and people's mentality, e.g.:

In Buddhist belief, the impermanence of human life may indeed be the law of nature. However, the author of this book argued that recognition of impermanence begets not resignation but hijōji, a state which can be productively handled and managed through strong will:

To manage the state of emergency, however, not only the strengthening of oneself but the help of the military was inevitable:

The author chided citizens for having elected corrupt politicians, citing local administrators who stole food and other goods in the midst of chaos. The masses were thus to blame for social and political corruption, and indirectly for the earthquake, while the military officials who distributed relief proved their “efficiency. . .during hijō jihen” when their activities were not intervened by parliamentary process. Thus, while life may be impermanent, morality was viewed as controllable with public reform and military power. “Suffice it to say that nature never brings harm to humans, it only brings good to us” wrote the author, though humans need to be able to “control nature by learning how to adapt to it and understand it.” He concluded with the statement:

Once nature's message was understood, Tokyo could be “the proud capital of the East within ten years from today.” Thus the earthquake “should be perceived by all as the destruction necessary to construct a better [society] both mentally and physically” (ibid., 137, 148–149, 160–162).

Nichirenism in Hijōji Nippon

The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 left a lasting impact on certain right-wing architects of the Emergency Japan of the 1930s. Among them were the military general Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949) and the revolutionary Kita Ikki (1883–1937), who, as much as any two Japanese, helped to make emergency a lived reality through assassinations, military insurgences, and coup d'etats. As zealous followers of Nichiren Buddhism, the two equated the convergent natural, political, economic, and diplomatic crises of this period with the Buddhist eschatology known as mappō, and called for the Japanese people to “regenerate” the world by restoring direct imperial rule. Their followers and other radical nationalists supported the slogan Showa ishin (Showa Restoration) as a necessary step to perfect the political reform undertaken by the national leaders of Meiji Japan. Just as there was likely some relationship between the earlier Meiji Restoration and yonaoshi,Footnote ¹⁵ Ishiwara's and Kita's nationalist discourses and Buddhist-inspired visions similarly drew sustenance from that concept. The “post-disaster utopianism” of 1923 and after was thus dominated, at least on the right, with ideas and images selectively salvaged from Nichiren Buddhist texts.

Ishiwara Kanji was a disciple of the lay monk Tanaka Chigaku (1861–1939) who spearheaded a movement marrying Nichiren Buddhism with an extreme, Emperor-centered nationalism, known as Nichirenism (Nichiren shugi). He first formed an apocalyptic vision of Japan's fate in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake. Ishiwara was in Germany at that time, but the news of Japan's devastated condition convinced him that Nichiren's prophesy for “the eventual appearance of the Great Bodhisattvas of the Earth” was indeed true and imminent (Ishiwara Reference Kanji and Reiichirō1985, 173; Matsuoka 2005, 108, 112). This was based on the writing of the thirteenth-century monk Nichiren who saw an earlier great earthquake, in 1257, as the sign the world was going through apocalyptic change in the age of mappō. Nichiren wrote:

Mappō is the final stage in a widely held 3-stage view of time over which the Buddha's teachings progress: shōbō, the True Age lasting either five hundred or one thousand years after the death of the historical Buddha; zōbō, the Imitation Age lasting five hundred or one thousand years; and lastly, mappō, the Last Age lasting ten thousand years (Marra Reference Marra1988a, 25). The Great Collection Sutra records the Buddha's prophecy that monks in the age of mappō will indulge themselves in quarrels, jealousy, and negligence of precepts, “thus accumulating vast evil karma which finally brings several calamities to a world already destined to dry up like a desert. Floods, typhoons, and famines bring people to exhaustion and to war in countries destroyed by earthquakes, pestilences, and fire, where wells, springs, and ponds dry up, and crops suffer the consequences of a total lack of rain.” The mappō is a time when the world becomes defiled by frequent wars and disasters (kōjoku), false teachings (kenjoku), evil passions (bonnōjoku), mental and physical weakness (shujōjoku), and the shortening of the human life span (myōjoku) (Marra Reference Marra1988a, 25–28). Buddhists in medieval Japan believed that this mappō had commenced in 1052 CE, based on a record dating Shakyamuni's nirvana to 949 BCE.Footnote ¹⁶ The political, social, and natural chaos that had befallen Japan in the thirteenth century was perceived by many as the signs of the dharma's last days. With the prediction above, Nichiren advocated the imminent realization of the Buddha land in Japan, and nowhere else, since, according to some accounts in the Lotus and Nirvana Sutras, the Four Bodhisattvas of the Earth (who appeared after some catastrophic event) were entrusted by Shakyamuni with the task of protecting and delivering his teachings (Tamura Reference Yoshirō1986, 291, 297, 328). When the Mongols first sent their envoys to Japan in 1268, it reinforced Nichiren's sense that he was a prophet, the sole “evangelist (gyōja) of the Lotus Sutra,” and one of the Four Bodhisattvas of the Earth (Tokoro Reference Shigemoto1965, 344).

The image of mappō, of a degenerate world, was accepted by Ishiwara at a time of intensifying international strife, which caused him to advocate a theory of “final war” as a means to attain the prophesied world regeneration. The war was to be fought between Asia and the West, led by Japan and the United States respectively. Japan, for her kokutai (national polity) and eminence as the holy birthplace of Nichiren, was destined to win and end all human conflicts. The Manchurian Incident of 1931 was masterminded by Ishiwara so as to prepare Japan to mobilize both human and natural resources for this total war. With this war, he said, humanity will face “God's judgment” before establishing “a higher form of civilization” embracing the spirit of hakkō ichiu (Ishiwara Reference Kanji and Kanji zenshū kankōkai1976, 51, 79–80, 94–98, 147–149; Peattie Reference Peattie1975, 37–48).Footnote ¹⁷

Ishiwara drew the justification for his “final war” from two sources. The first was Nichiren's statement in Senjishō that “a great war, unprecedented in prior ages, shall break out in the world” at the beginning of mappō (Stone Reference Stone and Wessinger2000, 272). Nichiren was warning the government authorities against the Mongol invasion, which was six years away, but Ishiwara used it to argue that “a war of unprecedented scale is certain to occur in the world led by the leadership of Japan.” The second theoretical grounding came from Ishiwara's analysis of military history, in which he divided the evolutionary process of war technology into three periods according to the types of weapons and strategies. From this study, Ishiwara speculated that the “final war” would break out within thirty years, mobilizing all the forces of human technological progress. Once ended, the world would be left with no more wars to fight, thus gradually moving toward peace and unification over the following twenty years (Ishiwara Reference Kanji and Kanji zenshū kankōkai1976, 36–39, 54–55, 80).

Ishiwara argued that his own chronology corresponded with the Buddhist eschatological timeline for the Former, Middle, and Latter Days of Buddha Law. However, when he was confronted by modern scholarship on Shakyamuni's nirvana, which revised its date from 949 BCE to the fifth or sixth century BCE, Ishiwara came up with a “dual theory of mappō” in order to adjust the time-lag between the two chronologies (Stone Reference Stone and Wessinger2000, 273). According to his dual theory, the advent of the Four Great Bodhisattvas of the Earth occurs at two discrete points in history. This was based on Nichiren's statement: “Know this: in the time for shakubuku the Four Bodhisattvas appear as wise kings who rebuke and convert evil kings, and in the time for shōju they appear as priests to embrace and spread true Buddhism” (Yampolsky Reference Yampolsky and Burton1990, 178).Footnote ¹⁸ Ishiwara reasoned that the first advent occurred when the prophet Nichiren was born and spread the True Dharma. For the second advent, he claimed that the Bodhisattvas would reveal themselves as the true sovereigns of Japan in the actual timeframe of mappō.Footnote ¹⁹ Since the revised beginning of mappō now corresponded with Columbus’ arrival in America in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, Ishiwara became convinced that it marked the successive conflicts between East and West. Calculating that about 2430 years had passed by his time, he concluded that world unification would be achieved within the next seventy years or so, or before the 2500^th year in the Buddhist eschatology. The proximity of this estimated figure to the number arrived at by Ishiwara's analysis of military history supported both his religious and political visions (Ishiwara Reference Kanji and Kanji zenshū kankōkai1976, 82–85).

Ishiwara's faith in Nichiren never diminished even in the last years of his life, but after Japan's defeat in 1945 he supported the country's disarmament policy as the “mandate of Heaven which has entrusted Japan to lead humanity to everlasting peace.” Now Ishiwara believed that technological development would allow humans to live a materially and spiritually sufficient life free of calamities and wars. The world unification he now considered to be accomplished by advanced aircraft and aerospace technology, which would bring people together under one cosmology based on their knowledge about and mutual interest in outer space. All races on the earth would also be gradually assimilated into one through intermarriage (Ishiwara Reference Kanji and Kanji zenshū kankōkai1977, 571, 592–606; Stone Reference Stone and Wessinger2000, 275). We can see in Ishiwara the combination of religious mysticism and fascination with modern technology (as signaling/facilitating epochal change) that would later manifest in Aum Shinrikyō and certain strains of Islamism.

Kita Ikki was another Nichiren devotee and central architect of emergency whose political visions were also deeply inspired by the Lotus millenarianism. He proposed a Japanese form of national socialism in order to build a socialist world through Japanese conquest over the Western capitalist nations. Like Ishiwara, Kita equated the political emergency with Nichiren's idea of mappō and advocated aggressive measures to usher in the predestined world regeneration (Kita Reference Ikki1959, 203).

Messianism was particularly strong in Kita, who identified himself as “a second Nichiren.” His millenarian visions first appeared as Shina kakumei gaishi (Unofficial History of the Chinese Revolution), written in 1915. Modeled on Nichiren's Risshō ankoku ron (Establishing the Legitimate Teaching for the Peace of the Nation), it warned the state authorities of Western designs on Asia and compared them with the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century (Kita Reference Ikki1959; Wilson Reference Wilson1969, 57-62; Stone Reference Stone and Wessinger2000, 269–270). “I hereby dedicate to you this Taishō ankoku ron,” Kita wrote in the conclusion and cautioned that the world's fate rested on the religious consciousness of Japan's leaders (Kita Reference Ikki1959, 203). He even dedicated the Lotus Sutra to the Regent (Hirohito) (Tokoro Reference Shigemoto, Yoshirō and Eishū1972, 104–105). Kita claimed that the Buddha was incarnated in the body of the Meiji Emperor and every morning, he and his wife worshipped the altar which enshrined the Emperor's portrait, as well as a wooden plate engraved with the seven-letter title of the Lotus Sutra. During the ritual, his wife often entered a trance and communicated what she claimed were the prophecies of Nichiren and other historical figures. These were recorded in Kita's hand almost every day for more than seven years until two days before the occurrence of the infamous coup d'etat of February 26, 1936. Scholars generally agree that the fanaticism of that period was partly a “product of Kita's . . . ideologies and fantasies” and that he had some impact on the cadre of young and idealistic military officers who led the insurrection (Matsumoto Reference Ken'ichi1987, 322–328). To uplift the spirit of his admirers Kita compared them with the Bodhisattvas of the Earth. He wrote:

On the day of the coup, about 1,500 men led by a cadre of officers assassinated high government officials and seized the main government quarter in the heart of Tokyo. The insurrection was a tribute to Kita's Nihon kaizō hōan taikō (A Plan for the Reorganization of Japan) written in 1923, the very year of the earthquake, a text that urged the ‘restoration’ of direct imperial rule. He was executed in 1937 along with other insurgents, but the incident became a milestone event on the Japanese military's path to power (Tokoro Reference Shigemoto, Yoshirō and Eishū1972, 107).

By this time (from about 1932 onward) the term hijōji had re-emerged to become even more ubiquitous than in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake; it was now to be the name for the era of Japan's regeneration. The term increasingly appeared in books and articles written by right-leaning intellectuals, such as the seven-volume Hijōji kokumin zenshū (The Collection of the Emergency Nation) of 1934, which elucidated the concept over seven different areas: Diplomacy, Living, Industry, Economy, Air Force, Navy, and Army. An army-sponsored documentary propaganda film entitled Hijōji Nippon was released in 1933, by which time the term had worked its way into everyday language, even becoming the keyword of a popular greeting. When one asked “what time is it now?” the other would answer “it's hijōji” (the time of emergency).

Although the term now referred to the political, diplomatic, and economic situation rather than the earthquake, emergency usefully confounded their differences. The common thread was conditions imposed by outside powers beyond Japan's control: in the first instance Heaven and in the other, the hostile foreign world. Emergency in the early 1930s provided nearly as vivid an image of distress as actual warfare or a city in flames. The Mongol invasion of Japan in the thirteenth century and the contacts with foreign countries after the Meiji Restoration were listed as the other examples of hijōji and kokunan (national challenges) in the course of Japanese history. Hijōji to kokubō (Emergency and National Defense) published by the Ministry of Army in 1935 argued that emergency of the 1930s was predestined ever since the Japanese decided to open themselves to Western thoughts (Ministry of the Army 1935, 199).

Ironically, as emergency became more deeply indigenized in Japan, its use abroad spread apace, especially in the United States. One author, Shirosaki Kyōichi, dealt with this paradox by writing in 1934:

Whatever power the concept of emergency might have had to explain or mollify a common global distress was no match for nationalism, which by the 1930s had thoroughly co-opted the term to describe its own need for protection and regeneration.

Toward the Emergency State

In most historical accounts, the Hijōji Nippon of the 1930s is presented as mainly responsive to the global financial crisis of 1929. As we have demonstrated, however, a full-bodied language of emergency was crafted well before the collapse of the global economy, and against the backdrop of natural disaster. The disaster was compelling in ways that abstract theorizations about the shape and role of governments, societies, and economies could never be, and the disaster zone was approached as a site of opportunity and meaning as well as trial. The state of emergency was, at its point of origin, an actionable space within chaos. While the concept may have been given global wings by the British States of Emergency of 1920–21 (which continued Emergency Legislation from the time of the First World War), it gained added power and charisma in Japan, and likely other places, by its association with natural catastrophe. Thus did modern politics establish a new connection with the traditional realm of the sublime, and in the case of Japan, the supernatural and the religious. Other charismas would attach themselves to other states of emergency in subsequent decades, but emergency's association of politics with nature would never disappear, and has perhaps even strengthened in the early twenty-first century.

In the Japanese case, the emergence of a politics of hijōji during the inter-war period had particularly dire results. While the nation had previously experienced dai-shin-sai (great earthquake disasters), dai-ka-sai (great fire disasters), etc., the coining of a transcendent term and its ability to incorporate the political, the social, the natural, the supernatural, and the historical into a single frame, provided the Right with a powerful linguistic toolbox it would deploy to devastating effect in the decade following Tokyo's destruction. For many, Japan would remain in a perpetual state of emergency from the moment the earth began to move in 1923 until the beginnings of post-war recovery in the 1950s, if not later. By this time the world at large had adopted the concept to help describe the linked and seemingly interminable illnesses of its political and natural systems.

As we write, the language of emergency is again re-emerging in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011. The Japanese right-wing newspaper, Sankei, used hijōji in headlines to attack Prime Minister Kan Naoto's action as too defensive and indecisive to deal with the “unprecedented kokunan.” Writing that Japan's current crisis is far too great to overcome within the political formalities of heiji, they stressed the need for a more capable and daring leader like Gotō Shinpei, author of Tokyo's ambitious but ill-fated 1923 revival plan.Footnote ²⁰ Their editorials also praised Japan's National Defense Force as the embodiment of bushidō, while Buddhist celebrities shared their thoughts on the catastrophic event by recalling the teachings of mujō and Nichiren. Most explicitly, Governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintarō called the tsunami a punishment from Heaven to cleanse the Japanese people of their selfish desires.Footnote ²¹ Unlike in 1923, however, this last statement caused so much anger among survivors and controversy among the public that Ishihara was forced to rescind it. We are too close to the present catastrophe to know its social and political outcome, near or longer-term, but can take solace in the fact that history never exactly repeats itself.