TRIBUTE TO THE DEAD

Taranaki Daily News, 17 September 1924, Page 5

TRIBUTE TO THE DEAD

THE JAPANESE EARTHQUAKE. ANNIVERSARY OBSERVANCES. Tokio, Sept. 1. The sound of booming temple bells and the mourning syrens at 11.58 a.m. to-day—the time when the great earthquake first rocked the city a year ago —brought all Tokio to ita feet and stopped all forms of activity for two minutes, during which silence was observed in memory of the 200,000 dead, the bodies of some of whom are still b< ing exhumed among the ruins at Yokohama. From a very early hour gicat crowds of mourners were streaming in and out of the temples, where ceaseless prayers were intoned by thousands of priests. The greatest crowd was on the site of the army depot, at Honjo, where thousands were suffocated, at Yoshiwara Park, where 1000 women were trapped and died in the boiling waters of a pond, and at the Zozoji temple in Shiba Park, where the bodies of crushed victims were heaped a year ago. Similar scenes were witnessd at Yokohama and Yokosuka, while services were held in all the cities of Japan. Disorders, which Communists, Koreans, and others had thratened to cause, failed to materialise. The Koreans held memorial services yesterday, when messages of condolence from the former Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers were read. The •Prime Minister, Viscount Kato, to-day issued an appeal to the nation, to emerge from the slough of habits of extravagance and idleness acquired as the result of the great outpouring of profits during the world war, and to return to the old-time habits of thrift and industry. “I shudder to see the fiction progressing gaily and heedlessly along a path of luxury and waste, leading to disaster for Japan,” says the Prime Minister, who exhorts the nation to show the same spirit towards social reform as it showed when facing the greatest catastrophe a year ago.