by ANDRE HAAG
Abstract: The murderous mayhem following the 1923 Great Kant? Earthquake, which resulted in infamous Korean massacres, was most commonly known and commemorated in Japanese at the time using the term Ch?senjin sawagi, which ambiguously evoked a disturbance involving Korean people. Although both Ch?senjin sawagi and “panic” represent contested lenses for viewing the atrocity, this essay revisits the event and its narration through an approach informed by the local multi-semantic sign sawagi and the transnational framework of colonial panic. By highlighting overlooked connections and continuities that run through the vocabularies and stories of a culture of colonial fear and insecurity, it is possible to apprehend the Ch?senjin sawagi as a colonial panic attack that hit the imperial center, but also a revolt against the logic of integrated empire that echoed the 1919 March First Independence Uprising in Korea, another event discursively contained within the framework of sawagi.
Anniversaries of the 1923 Great Kant? Earthquake have long afforded opportunities to confront and contest the meanings of the Korean massacres, an imperial atrocity that followed in the catastrophe’s wake.1 On the eve of the very first anniversary of the Great Kant? Earthquake in 1924, for example, one Tokyo newspaper proposed that collective remembrance focus not on the September 1 disaster itself, but instead confront the murky morass of “stupid, reckless, and exceedingly barbaric” acts it referred to only as the “Senjin sawagi [????] of September 2” (Tokyo Asahi Shinbun 1924). The Tokyo Asahi argued that “to mark the anniversary of the day of the disaster, the first step must be to make public a full accounting of that Senjin sawagi, and openly apologize for wrongs committed.” After all, the piece reasoned, while no one was likely to forget the traumatic experience of the earthquake, some were all too eager to “bury in darkness” the memory of “incidents” (jiken) involving Korean people (named here with the vulgar diminutive Senjin). Yamada Sh?ji (2003, 8-13) cites this as an early example of counter-discourse against the suspected cover-up of responsibility for the massacres by the imperial state, which he asserts continues to the present day.
But the column does not elaborate on these incidents or their causes, and perhaps did not need to, because that keyword Senjin sawagi would have been legible to readers as shorthand for post-disaster experiences that some (Ubukata 1978, 340) remembered as “even more terrifying than the earthquake and conflagrations.” The words evoked the spread of frightening rumors (ry?gen higo) about Korean insurrection, well-poisoning, and arson that, though quickly shown to be groundless, nonetheless aroused paranoia and pandemonium on streets around the smoldering capital, where armed vigilante groups, police, and soldiers hunted Koreans at roadside checkpoints, culminating in the infamous massacres. It is ironic that the newspaper’s ostensible call for an honest accounting for the Korean massacres refuses to use the word “massacres” (gyakusatsu) at all, instead employing the multi-semantic sign sawagi, which might suggest either an uncontrollable “Korean Panic” among ethnic Japanese, a “Korean Mutiny” by migrants from the colony, or a meaningless outburst of noise and emotion unleashed by the seismic disaster itself.
Looking back from a point almost a hundred years later, my attention is drawn to the slippery keyword that shaped how the story of the Kant? massacres was first told: sawagi. That language, and the connections it obscures or reveals, informs my approach to the event’s cultural representation and resonance in the vocabularies and narratives of a Japanese colonial empire that had uneasily incorporated Koreans subjects. In 1923-1924, Ch?senjin sawagi named a confusing, contested episode between Korea and Japan that was to be contained rather than commemorated. Yet, with all its ambiguity, this was among the most prominent term at the time for remembering a collective experience that so gripped the cultural imaginary that a complete cover up was impossible. That phrase Ch?senjin sawagi stands out in the voluminous archives of earthquake accounts, a “fixed, constant referent” in schoolchildren’s essays (Ryang 2010), and a “ubiquitous” feature of writings about the disaster by literary figures, including those that avoided mention of the killings (Bates 2015, 163). Even the word sawagi by itself, with the modifier “Korean” redacted or replaced with another, was in this context nearly synonymous with rumors and vigilantes, and could sufficiently evoke the days of tumult and terror, as Figures 1 (above) and 2 (below) illustrate.
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