JAPANESE DISASTER.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15922, 10 September 1923, Page 5

JAPANESE DISASTER.

ALLEGED REASON. PITIFUL STORIES. (Sun.) OSAKA, September 8. Yokohuka reports state that the warship Amagi, which , was stuck at Haruna base, has been towed out damaged'. The general army and aviation headquarters are being moved to •Osaka. It is officially reported that Admiral Nomaguchi and 1000 'Yokohama policemen are missing. NEW YORK, September 8. There is general agreement among Japanese Scientists that the earthquake was the dying convulsion of the volcano Oshifna. Simultaneouly with the quake, it burst into terrific eruption, spreading destruction •everywhere; then, as if its fury were spent in one great effort, it collapsed and sank into the sea. To its sinking is attributed the tidal wave which swept the coast-line. The' Chicago Tribune’s correspondent thinks that 500 foreigners were killed in Yokohama alone. 'Of the 200 guests at the Oriental Palace Hotel, only a few escaped. The United, Club, Court, and Cherrymount Hotels were obliterated. . Wishing to avoid epidemics, the medical authorities, are making every effort to break the hordes of refugees clustered in the public parks of the capital. Terrible squalor prevails, and every rule of sanitation is broken by th® throngs who are forced to live in huddled confusion, unable to wash, wearing clothing taken from corpses, and drinking contaminated ditch-water^ Refugees are being inoculated against cholera and typhoid when they arrive at Osaka and Kobe.

BUSINESS CENTRE MOVED. (A. and N.Z. Cable). 1 NEW YORK, September 7. The Press Tokio correspondent says that several more relief vessels have entered the port and fresh troops have arrived, •chiefly engineers, who began to restore the railways in order that food and clothing which are accumulating at Kobe and Osaka might speedily be moved to the capital. Meanwhile Osaka has become the new centre of business and communication, and the Government is considering removing the Foreign Office thither. Kobe has become the silk export centre whither is slowly gravitating the main offices of all industrial and commercial houses which were formerly located in Tokio and Yokohama.

SURVIVORS’ STORIES. GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS. (Reuter). SHANGHAI. September 9. Stories of survivors arriving from Yokohama confirm the earlier reports

of the terrible visitation whensuddenly, without the slightest warning and with a tremendous roar the ground heaved up and sank again, the first shock lasting 30 seconds. Foreign business places crumpled like paper and houses on the Bluff: xwere precipitated into the city below. Huge erevisses- opened in the ground, which rocked and heaved like the waves of -{he sea. , ■ MjliS Immediately big / fires broke out and fanned by a'strong wind spread

rapidly unni tne cuy was enveiopeu in a .cloud of flame and smoke which cleared later to reveal a scene of wholesale devastation. Survivors give graphic details of the rush, of enormous crowds amid the tumbling houses; of broken roads through the spreading flames and through the streams of burning oil which had escaped from the ex-, ploded oil tanks. The whole way was littered with the dead and 4 dying. Many weaker ones were crushed to death in the rush to the waterfront and open spaces. Hundreds were drowned in the canals. People leapt into the sea from the- water front, waded out in an. endeavour to escape cinders from the burning buildings, among which

lay hundreds of charred' bodies. Members of the British colony were gathered on the jetty farewelling "the steamer Empress of Australia, when the mole humped its back like a •caterpillar 1 , several .places being thirty feet in the air, then the structure subsided and rose again and finally collapsed into the sea. Some people were flung into the water where they clung to floating objects, while the others were left on the isolated remnant of the mole till rescued When the walls of the Negiohi •prison collapsed 5,000 convicts were ■v released and the most desperate ones sought profit by the calamity * by looting and in many cases and

murdering disabled people, but hastily formed bodies of citizens hunted out the miscreants and exacted a summary death penalty. The American Hospital jbuilding was hurled from the Bluff. The earthquake also tore open the ground in the cemetery exhuming corpses. _________