On September 1, 2026, Tokyo’s Yokoamichō Park hosted a memorial ceremony to commemorate the Koreans who succumbed to the “Kantō Massacre” that followed the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923.
Background
The history of the “Kantō Massacre” is less well known in Russia than the issue of “comfort women,” yet it occupies a key place in the historical dialogue between Japan and Korea.
On September 1, 1923, the Great Kantō Earthquake, with a magnitude of 8.3, all but wiped Tokyo, Yokohama, and their surroundings off the map. The tragedy affected approximately 4 million people: over 140,000 died, and another 40,000 went missing. In terms of scale of destruction, this earthquake remains the most catastrophic in Japanese history—even the aftermath of the 2011 disaster proved less extensive. Material damage was then estimated at $4.5 billion: a sum equal to two annual national budgets and five times Japan’s expenditure on the Russo-Japanese War.
At that time, Japan was home to a large number of Korean laborers. After the annexation of Korea in 1910, Koreans formally became Japanese subjects, but in fact they were treated as second-class people. They were recruited for heavy, low-paid work in mines and on construction sites, while the local population regarded them with undisguised irritation, fueled by both economic competition and xenophobia.
Tensions were stoked by the political context. In 1919, the March First Movement for independence erupted in Korea and was brutally suppressed. From then on, the Japanese authorities saw Koreans as a potential threat. The situation was compounded by the fact that many workers belonged to leftist unions, which the police regarded as “hotbeds of socialism.” The Japanese press actively demonized Koreans, attributing to them a propensity for crime, immoral behavior, and rebellion, and, thus, shaping the image of a Korean person as a dangerous “outsider” and an enemy of the Japanese state in the public consciousness.
“Induced Psychosis” or Provocation?
Already by the afternoon of September 1, rumors began circulating in Yokohama and Kawasaki that Koreans were setting fire to houses, poisoning wells, looting, and raping, allegedly out of revenge against the Japanese. From September 2 onward, rumors of arson and poisoned wells spread through officials and police agents, inciting the formation of lynch mobs.
The rumors were false—this is now acknowledged by literally all the serious researchers, including Japanese ones. It all begs an absolutely different question: were these rumors a spontaneous product of mass panic, or were they deliberately spread by the authorities?
In Korea, both South and North, it is customary to believe that Koreans became a “convenient enemy” onto whom mounting discontent could be redirected and thus brought under control. The country’s leadership remembered the Rice Riots of 1918 (mass unrest caused by rising rice prices, accompanied by attacks on police stations, rice warehouses, anti-government demonstrations, and so on), and to rule out their repetition, it chose the innocent Korean diaspora as a scapegoat.
The author holds a somewhat different position, which, however, likewise does not exonerate the authorities. The head of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, Akaike Atsushi, and the minister of the interior, Mizuno Rentarō, were known as “pacifiers” of the Korean national liberation struggle in 1919 and regarded Koreans with corresponding suspicion. Their reaction to rumors of “improper behavior” by Koreans after the earthquake was, in essence, predetermined by their entire prior experience. They therefore decided to act preemptively, at the same time eliminating everyone who posed a danger to the regime—union activists, socialists, and anarchists.
Scale and Character of the Killings
On September 2, amid the post-earthquake chaos, martial law was imposed in the disaster zone. The head of the Home Ministry’s police bureau, Gotō Fumio, sent prefectural governors a directive asserting that “Korean extremists” were allegedly using the catastrophe to organize riots and arson. The document contained a call for intensified surveillance and the adoption of “decisive measures.” This radiogram triggered a wave of mass pogroms.
The massacre continued for three weeks. Official estimates of the death toll range from 2,000 to 6,000, though Korean researchers cite figures of up to 10,000, pointing out that the authorities deliberately concealed the scale of the crimes and destroyed bodies. North Korea cites even higher figures: according to its version, 6,000 were killed in Tokyo alone, and the total number of victims exceeds 23,000.
The main perpetrators of the reprisals were “self-defense” units composed of retired military personnel, police officers, yakuza members, and volunteers, operating with the support or connivance of the authorities. Orders ranged from sanctions to kill in case of resistance to direct instructions to destroy all Koreans indiscriminately. To identify ethnic Koreans, lynch mobs forced passersby to pronounce complex Japanese phrases: the slightest accent became grounds for murder.
The victims of the pogroms were not only Koreans. Under the cover of ethnic cleansing, lynchers settled scores with political opponents of the regime. Among the dead were the anarchists Sakae Ōsugi and Noe Itō, the socialist Hirasawa Keishichi, and the leader of the Chinese community, Ō Kiten.
Investigation and Historical Memory
After September 18, 1923, the Japanese government arrested 735 participants in the massacre, yet none of them suffered severe punishment. On the contrary, the authorities placed responsibility for the unrest on the Koreans themselves and imposed a strict ban on publishing data on the number of dead.
The Korean Stance: Memory as Foundation
For the Korean side, the Kantō Massacre became one of the cornerstones of the anti-Japanese historical narrative. Since 1974, the Japan-Korea Association has held annual memorial ceremonies in Yokoamichō Park, which are regularly accompanied by protests from Japanese ultra-right forces.
On the centenary of the tragedy in 2023, South Korean media came out with calls not to turn away from the past, emphasizing: to become true partners, Japan must show honesty in assessing its dark pages of history. In December of that same year, National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo, during a meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, urged Tokyo to assist in establishing the truth, noting that joint work on acknowledging the past is necessary for building “future-oriented” relations. In North Korea, the 100th anniversary of the massacre was also marked with a solemn assembly, characterizing the events of 1923 as a “systematic mass murder that has no statute of limitations.”
The Japanese View: From Silence to Revisionism
In Japan, by contrast, a tendency toward silencing or revising the events predominates. For many years, school textbooks either ignored the massacre or described it as “riots” provoked by “rumors,” deliberately excluding the role of state bodies.
The policy of denial manifests at various levels:
Political rhetoric: In 2000, Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintarō provoked an international scandal by stating that “riots could have been expected” from migrants during the earthquake. In 2023, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno went so far as to declare that there was “insufficient evidence” that mass killings had taken place.
Institutional denial: In 2017, the government removed historical evidence of the massacre from its website. Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike has repeatedly refused to express condolences to the descendants of victims, insisting that the very fact of the massacre is “a subject of historical debate.”
Public sentiment: In Japan, books denying historical facts and supporting the government narrative are regularly published, many of which become bestsellers.
Despite the current policy of denial, the importance of preserving historical memory remains indisputable. Acknowledging the crimes of the past is a necessary step that sooner or later must be taken for the sake of justice and the future of the two peoples.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, Leading Research Fellow at the Centre for Korean Studies, Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences
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