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ArgumentHijōji(emergency) was an important keyword in the militarist Japan of the 1930s. Previous scholarship has assumed that such language sprung from the global financial crisis of 1929, and subsequent diplomatic events. Our article demonstrates, however, that a full-bodied language of emergency was crafted well before the collapse of the global economy, and against the backdrop of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed the Japanese capital. While previous “great earthquakes” had been opportunities to strengthen Japanese participation in the global project of science, this one led more dramatically to a crisis of reason, and indirectly contributed to the spiritual, anti-western, and anti-rational rhetoric of what became the “Showa Restoration.” This and other post-disaster landscapes, we argue, should be examined as compelling sites for the crafting of political language – sites of opportunity and meaning as well as trial. While the phrase “state of emergency” was coined under very different circumstances in post-war Britain, it gained power and charisma in Japan, and likely other places around the world, 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. Emergency's ability to associate politics with nature would never disappear, and has perhaps even strengthened in the early twenty-first century.

On October 28, 1891, one of the most powerful earthquakes in modern Japanese history rocked the main island of Honshu from Tokyo to Osaka. Centered on the populous Nōbi Plain north of Nagoya, this was the first daishinsai (‘great earthquake disaster’) of the Meiji era, and the strongest to visit central Japan in 37 years. The Great Nōbi Earthquake killed only 7–8,000 people (compared to the over 100,000 destined to die in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923), mostly inhabitants of towns and villages in Nagoya's hinterland. But its breadth and power were unprecedented in the memories of most Japanese, and the event became the subject of many dozens of books, newspaper and journal articles, paintings and woodblock prints, and even images on fans, plates, and lampshades. This was Japan's first truly national natural catastrophe. It was national in the sense that it was deemed by many of its narrators to have affected the new nation-state directly, and a nationalizing discourse of alarm, regret, recrimination, sympathy, and even patriotism was generated around it by a newly-consolidating modern print media.