Mapping Imperial Japan’s Greatest Calamities: Learning Nation and Enacting Empire Through Disaster

Clara Bergamini
History
UC Santa Cruz

My dissertation looks at Imperial Japan’s most catastrophic pre-war disasters, the 1896 Meiji Sanriku Earthquake and the 1923 Kantō Earthquake, to map how periods of crisis intersected with nationalism, imperialism, memory, and everyday life from the 19th to the 20th century. This project will bring Geographic Information System mapping and monograph-style narration together to create an interactive website that takes viewers through the socio-political and environmental history of these disasters in visual and written modes. Using material from newspapers, state agencies, memorials, and personal accounts, this interactive website will contribute to global understandings of the long-term influence of disasters. Catastrophe, I argue, has been key to socio-political and spatial change in Japan.

Image: Yokoamichō Park on the morning of September 1, 2023, the 100th anniversary of the Kantō earthquake.