Gennifer Weisenfeld and Charles Schencking have written similar yet distinguishable books. As highly capable mid-career scholars able to combine weighty arguments with limpid prose, Weisenfeld and Schencking employ their talents to explore the same topic—the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923—through different methodological approaches. Both scholars chart chronologically the unfolding of the calamity and its aftermath. They both interpret the earthquake as a natural disaster that generated social, cultural, and political aftershocks, but they draw different conclusions regarding the earthquake's significance. Taken together, these two books illuminate an understudied moment of magnitude in Taishō-era Japan and raise provocative questions about the writing of 1920s history.

As an art historian with an allegiance to the methods and insights of cultural history, Weisenfeld employs images of all sorts—photographs, seismographs, postcards, prints, paintings, maps, bar graphs, political cartoons—to interpret the earthquake's importance. After a chapter on the premodern history of earthquakes in Japan, Weisenfeld devotes six chapters to the visual culture produced by an interwar society and polity rattled by nature's wrath. She examines in chapter 2 how photographic and seismographic renderings of the earthquake's power generated predictable reactions—fear, disgust, scientific curiosity—and also unpredictable ones such as “dark tourism,” the practice of tourists visiting a devastated Tokyo to survey the wreckage and carnage. Chapter 3 explores the “power and politics of looking” (p. 83) by analyzing the media-led transformation of the earthquake into a spectacle that shook public confidence in the “idea of progressive modernity” (p. 109). Weisenfeld then shifts attention away from disaster's immediate aftermath to questions of reconstruction and memory. In Chapter 4, she attends to the visual renderings of ruins as enduring reminders of the fragility of modernity's promise. Chapters 5 and 6 chronicle the attempts of politicians and their critics to interpret natural destruction as a prophecy of revolutionary upheaval or as a moment of constructive opportunity. For instance, Weisenfeld probes the proletarian-inspired images that decorated the barracks built to house the homeless after the earthquake, as well as Gotō Shinpei's deployment of charts, graphs, and maps to make a forward-looking case for urban renewal. Finally, the last chapter evaluates the official and unofficial attempts to remember and forget disaster, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the 1923 quake and culminating with the construction of the Earthquake Memorial Hall in 1929.

Not surprisingly, Weisenfeld's book is visually arresting, chock-full of striking images that seize the reader's attention. Yet after stopping to stare at a newspaper photograph or contemplate a political cartoon, I was always eager to return to Weisenfeld's words, for her ideas were equally mesmerizing. Throughout the book, she strives to show how “the visual became imbued with social significance” (p. 37) and, in that pursuit, she regularly squeezes creative insight from the visual record. For example, Weisenfeld's analysis reveals the centrality of the emotions and the senses to an understanding of the 1923 earthquake's reverberant power. She explores how the producers of visual culture, whether artists, photographers, scientists, politicians, or satirists, worked to evoke emotions and shudder the senses in an attempt to shape public feeling. Weisenfeld documents the work of cartoonist Kitazawa Rakuten and others who created images to elicit tears, laughter, anger, and unease. These provocateurs hoped to manipulate feeling in order to generate action, whether that action be political protest (by those disgusted by post-catastrophe profiteers) or the purchase of an insurance policy (by those frightened by advertisements that emphasized the instability of the post-1923 world). Weisenfeld's forays into the history of the emotions and the senses is a welcome new direction for the study of Japan's modern past.

Schencking's account of the 1923 earthquake is as illuminative as Weisenfeld's but in different ways. Schencking divides his book into eight chapters whose titles present both a chronology of disaster and an interpretive framework: “Cataclysm,” “Aftermath,” “Communication,” “Admonishment,” “Optimism,” “Contestation,” “Regeneration,” and “Readjustment.” As the author of a previous study of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Schencking is drawn toward political and social history, as opposed to Weisenfeld's attraction to cultural history. His chapter “Aftermath,” for instance, analyzes the relief efforts of social, political, and military organizations in the weeks immediately following the disaster and scrutinizes the structural impediments and human decisions that made truly effective response an impossibility. According to Schencking, the all-powerful modern nation-state, for specific historical reasons, found itself incapable of countering the initial chaos unleashed by the destructive forces of nature. Later, in the chapter entitled “Contestation,” Schencking shows how a range of political actors were unable to forge a consensus on the path to reconstruction, despite insistent public demand for action from the governing elite. He writes, “[P]olitical power remained diffuse and spread formally among many bureaucratic actors, government ministers, and parliamentarians, and informally among influential elder statesmen” (p. 189). The result was extended political infighting and, in the end, nothing more than modest action. His detailed account of Diet floor debates, territorial rivalries between bureaucrats and party politicians, and the fulminations of elder statesmen furnishes an image of Taishō governance as hardly democratic yet also far from authoritarian. In this regard, Schencking's desire to ponder the detailed workings of 1920s political culture, a topic all but forgotten in recent historical work, is more than welcome.

Each of Schencking's chapters is replete with not only argument but also evidence. Schencking is a demon researcher and, at times, readers may become overwhelmed by the sheer number of examples that he is able to provide. But I liked Schencking's penchant for example. It revealed a historian's desire to generate empathic understanding and to vivify the objects of the historian's analysis. Throughout the book, Schencking portrays a range of historical actors as human beings who suffered immeasurably at the time of disaster, or who behaved horribly or selfishly in the wake of disaster, or who survived bravely beyond the disaster. Such humane detail, combined with an admirably fluent writing style, makes Schencking's book into a compelling narrative history as well as a satisfying analytic one.

Despite the particular strengths of these two books, both Schencking and Weisenfeld struggle with the same problem: how to explain the 1920s without gazing ahead into the hypnotic moment known as Japan's wartime years. For example, Schencking is eager to distinguish the 1920s as a political moment from the 1930s, a decade when bureaucrats and military leaders overcame the obstacles to authoritarianism and transformed Japan's political landscape. According to Schencking, what was present in the 1930s (authoritarianism) was not present in the 1920s and, hence, the 1920s are distinguishable from the 1930s. While convinced by his interpretation, I also sensed in Schencking's analysis a historian unable to disentangle the 1920s from the 1930s. Schencking has trouble describing the 1920s in terms that are free from reference to the wartime political culture, as if the 1920s must be explained in the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks employed by historians of the wartime era. Schencking's struggles generated within me a series of questions for future research: In recent historical work, has the 1920s as a decade been semi-colonized by the 1930s? Have Japan's wartime years cast a gloomy and authoritarian shadow over the 1920s in a manner that constricts the historian's imagination? Does their shadow presence influence the topics that historians of the 1920s choose to explore, the arguments they make, and even the tone they employ? I am not calling for historians to disconnect the 1920s from the 1930s, for historians must always concern themselves with the dynamics of the time after (and before) their chosen era of chronological focus. However, my worry is that the 1920s have become subordinated to the 1930s, and that the questions we ask of the 1920s are often determined by the questions we ask of the 1930s.

An ever-widening group of historians rightly presents the 1930s and 1940s as a dark yet transformative moment in twentieth-century Japan, but should this mean that the 1920s take on a dark hue born of wartime's shadow? For instance, Weisenfeld's work, at times, takes on this gloomy pall. Her tone is often somber, and her analysis regularly fixates on visual representations of brooding portents of disaster in the years after the 1923 earthquake. She speaks of the earthquake as revealing “the fragility of modern society” and “the shock of the modern” (p. 2), all the while emphasizing critical voices who equate the earthquake with a foolish commitment to “modernity's gamble” (p. 86). Of course, Weisenfeld is analyzing the reactions to cataclysm, which tend toward the fretful and despairing, but it is important to note that, by contrast, Schencking does find ways to chronicle at length the optimism and opportunism that emerged in the wake of seismic tragedy. Weisenfeld's book thus adds to a growing corpus that portrays the 1920s as a decade of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and disaster that foreshadows the onset of the ultimate disaster—war. These historians are not wrong to portray the 1920s in this way, but I wonder whether this propensity—to allow the doom and gloom of the wartime years to bleed into the 1920s (and before)—springs from unconscious and excessive deference to the wartime years as the defining moment of Japan's twentieth century. Has the war become a tyrannical presence in the study of Japan's twentieth century?

Its presence has certainly prevented historians from imagining particular topics as transwar topics, in other words, ones that span the prewar, wartime, and postwar years. Influential work that explores the sociocultural history of early twentieth-century Japan, including recent monographs by Jordan Sand, Barbara Sato, Elyssa Faison, and Alisa Freedman and the older writings of Earl Kinmonth and Donald Roden, rarely ventures into the wartime years. These historians stop short of 1931 or briefly dip a toe into the “brittle decade” of the 1930s, to borrow a phrase from John Dower.Footnote ¹¹ Why are historians hesitant to enter into the wartime years to explore the history of home, family, education, consumerism, and other similar topics? Is it because such topics, in one way or another, all examine how Japanese citizens negotiated the emerging modern landscape to realize opportunity, mobility, and satisfaction? Somehow, this story of opportunity creation, mobility achievement, and satisfaction seeking—a story of the citizen's embrace of modernity—is inconsistent with the interpretive thrust of work on Japan's wartime years, which emphasizes the constriction of opportunity, the repression (or subtle manipulation) of the citizenry, and dissatisfaction with modernity. The power of wartime darkness appears to inhibit historians from pursuing certain topics beyond 1931. For example, I have always been curious about what happened to romantic love or educational mobility or department stores during the wartime years. We historians have not developed the confidence or desire to explore the transformative effect of the wartime years on these kinds of topics. The presence of such a roadblock within the historical imagination needs to be addressed.

These musings on writing the history of the 1920s and beyond are not meant as criticisms of Schencking's or Weisenfeld's books. Both are exemplary works of history—tenaciously researched, imaginatively argued, and carefully crafted. They left me feeling the same way that I feel after a delicious meal—happily sated, yet also looking forward to my next encounter with the chef, or in this case, with the next writings of these two talented scholars.