On this day in 1923, the day after the Great Kantō earthquake, a rumour began to move faster than any relief. It said that Koreans were poisoning wells and setting fires. It was not true. It travelled by word of mouth through wrecked streets, was repeated in official telegrams, and was printed in newspapers that had no way to check it and printed it anyway. Corrections came, but they came far too late.
Over the following weeks, military, police and vigilante groups killed an estimated six thousand people: mostly Koreans, also Chinese residents, Japanese mistaken for Koreans, and Japanese socialists, anarchists and labour organisers. Some were stopped at improvised checkpoints and asked to pronounce words that were thought to expose a foreign accent. People died over the sound of a syllable.
I work with printed sentences, so I know how quickly a line becomes a fact once it is set in type, and how little the retraction weighs against it. There were also households that hid neighbours in back rooms and outbuildings, and police officers in a few places who sheltered people rather than surrendered them. Their names are mostly not recorded. I think of them today, and of the thousands who were not hidden.
Jun, memorial services are still held each September, in Tokyo and in Korea, where Buddhist and Christian clergy and bereaved families read the names that were recovered, and pause where names are missing. Some of the graves were tended for decades by ordinary Japanese neighbours who kept the site from being forgotten.
Martial law was declared that same 2 September, which is part of why the checkpoints wore an official face. Later government inquiries put the toll well above the first official count, and the fuller figures took years to be written down.