JAPANESE DISASTER.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIV, 25 March 1924, Page 6

JAPANESE DISASTER.

The catastrophe of last September has never been adequately described, and perhaps it never will be until some Defoe of Japan sifts out from the inchoate mass of reports, rumors, and reminiscences the tale of the greatest disaster in all recorded time —but it is well worth while to set out two pictures. If the reader will imagine a space as long as from the Tower of London ,to Chelsea Hospital and as broad as from the Houses of Parliament to the Zoo in Hegent’s Park, and try to realise in some measure what its appearance was when the sun rose upon it on September 2, he will better understand what Tokio and all Japan have had to face, are still facing, and seem likely to bear the burden for years to come. The smouldering plain which had been Tokio was an almost level waste of still smoking destruction. Up from this wilderness of red, charred earth and wreckage of roof tiles a multitude of black, scarred stone, and iron twisted like waste paper or angled string showed where the roof-trees of 300,000 houses had stood at dawn on the day before. Here and there, upstanding like trees in the middle of this devil’s park, were still about 500 brick I or stone buildings of which not half were still habitable; the rest mere gaunt and gutted skeletons, and all were shaken to their girders. All that was left of the capital except some isolated palaces was a fringe of houses on the higher ground to windward. Compared with the awful extent of this holocaust the loss of life was less than was to have been expected—yet 200,000 men, women, and children were dead within this blackened plain. It was not chiefly under the falling | ruins, which sent up a roar to the sky for half an hour, and the dust until the wind sprang up, that the lives were lost. It was in the furnace of flames that the overturned “hibashi” had set alight in a thousand quarters at once—flames that the fast growing hurricane drove before it like a forset fire. With such fearful speed did the wind sweep into one gigantic conflagration the wooden houses of Tokio that many of those who sought safety in instant flight still found a death-trap waiting for them at every street end. In one open space near the Military Clothing Department, close to the great wrestling amphitheatre in Honjo, 36,000 conceive it, 36,000 —were burned to death in a screaming, defenceless crowd. Many thousands, too —the number will never be exactly known—of the wretched inmates of the Yoshiwara' died in agony behind the locked gates of their house of bondage. This is the. tragedy of which the world will one day require an explanation fuller than any that has been forthcoming yet. Twelve hours after the convulsion nothing living stirred in the lower districts by the river. Yet it is right to ask what could have been done. Every watermain was broken; the streets wer<» impassable; the telephones and telegraphs were dead; even the old device of blowing up streets in advance of the flames was useless when fires were everywhere, behind, before, and on all sides at once. Even in the wider streets by the snapping of fullycharged tramwires. There was no distinction in tins calamity. All suffered alike, from the foreign Embassies and

Baron Okura’s famous palace and museum to the waterside hovels of the utterly poor. Now for the other picture. As the train makes its way to-day up from Yokohama a sea of timber houses 1 envehfps it while yet three miles away i from the Central Station. And that j kindly yellow caravanserai stretches far and wide for thousands of acres, enfolding the still standing relics of the | Ginza, the Bond street of Tokio; lapping the stark, smoke-stained Coliseum of the wrestling hall that had looked down on such terrible human agony; gaily edging the streets with color—there is no money for gilding from one end of Tokio to the other—and ■ housing again a million and a half of the homeless. The trams run, the shops are open, the police are as vigilant as ever, communications are re- I stored. It is a. magnificent work, and one that once Jigaiii proves the sturdy determination and unfailing pluck ot the Japanese race. For it has been done by the people for the people, and, though the Government deserves credit for the manner in which profiteering was reduced to a minimum and enormous supplies of timber provided, together with the full available strength of the carpentry and joinery of Japan, it has been the almost superhuman ability of the Japanese to rise to the level of any material necessity that has done the work. There has been no blowing of trumpets; scarcely a Japanese paper has diminished the splendor of this reconstruction by self-praise—-the tendency is even to criticise; the work had to be done, and done it has been, quietly, and almost in silence Japan gave the word to Japan, and Japan leapt forward to- the huge effort One cannot help remembering a certain old sequence of wordsI—“and 1 —“and after the

earthquake a fire . . . and after the fire a still’small voice.” And assuredly ic is the voice of Japan that one listens to in this work of reconstruction; and it reassures us that all their troubles have not availed to abate by one jot their natural strength. They have determined to rebuild Tokio, and rebuilt it shall be. They, as well as we, know what fearful result might have followed the earthquake of Tuesday morning had a wind been bibwing instead of the dead calm which actually prevailed. But there will be no turning back. Japan has decided to go through—and "there is not an Englishman who does not wish her good luck and God speed in her great task.