THE JAPANESE CALAMITY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 1859, 8 September 1923, Page 5

THE JAPANESE CALAMITY.

Latest cables.

30,000 DEATHS REPORTED

100,000 INJURED

London, September 6

A radiogram from the Japanese Home Ministry estimates that 30,000 were killed and 100,000 injured, ana 350,000 buildings destroyed in Tokyo alone.

The Ministry also confirms the report of Yokohama's total destruction, and declares that Prince £sainonji is safe, although his villa has been destroyed.

It is learned that Mr H. A. F. Home, Commercial Attache to the British Ambassador, is dead.

It is reported that eight hundred patients in the Imperial Hospital were burned to death. There are 6,000,000 homeless refugees in Kobe. A wireless message says that the refugees describe Yokohama as a charnel house. Canals and the waterfront are filled with dead, and the stench of decomposing bodies in the violent heat is unbearable.

An early report that 200 foreigners lost their lives there is confirmed. Those killed were mostly caught shopping in the down-town district. British and American residents who escaped are gathering the bodies of their confreres for burial at sea. The remnants of the Chinese population in Yokohama are gathered in the Bluff without food or shelter. Their condition is pitiable. ARRIVAL OF RELIEF VESSELS. RESTORATION OF COMMERCE. (Press Association.—-Copyright.) (Received 8.40 a.m.) New York, September 7. The United Press Tokyo correspondent says that several more relief vessels have entered the port. Fresh troops have arrived, chiefly engineers, who began to restore the railways in order that food and clothing, which is accumulating at Kobe and Osaka, might speedily be moved to the capital. Meanwhile, Osaka has become a new centre of business and communication, and the Government is considering the removal of the Foreign Office thither.

Kobe has become a silk export centre, whither is slowly gravitating the main offices of all the industrial and commercial houses, which were formerly located in Tokyo and Yokohama.