‘That racism is still there’: film to relive slaughter of Koreans after Japan’s Great Kanto Earthquake

Rumours that Koreans in Tokyo were looting and committing arson after the 1923 quake saw Japanese vigilantes kill them by the thousands. Filmmaker Oh Choong-kong returns to the subject 30 years after his first works

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Ruins of burned streetcars after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake in Tokyo. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 11:16am, 7 Oct 2018Updated: 11:16am, 7 Oct 2018

Nearly 100 years after the “unresolved trauma” of the slaughter of thousands of Koreans in Japan in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, an ethnic Korean director is to make his third documentary on the subject.

Oh Choong-kong is a second-generation Korean who was born in Tokyo but now lives in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture. He made two documentaries in the 1980s about the killing of as many as 10,000 Koreans in and around the Japanese capital after the natural disaster, which claimed an estimated 120,000 lives.

More than 30 years later, however, 62-year-old Oh feels he has to make a third film to ensure the events of 1923 are not forgotten and that history is not glossed over.

“I feel the tragedy of the massacre again when I hear hate speech – such as ‘kill Koreans’ – in Japan again today,” Oh said. “That racism is still there and I want to bring together the knowledge of researchers looking into this incident with the voices of Korean residents of Japan who are working to make sure this is not forgotten and, at the same time, to make equally sure that it is not repeated.”

The Great Kanto Earthquake struck a little over one minute before midday on September 1, 1923, with its epicentre in Sagami Bay. The megathrust tremor had a magnitude of 7.9, triggered a tsunami that reached a maximum height of 12 metres and lasted, according to some accounts, as long as 10 minutes.

The quake devastated Tokyo and the port of Yokohama to the south, as well as the surrounding prefectures of Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka. The damage was exacerbated by the number of major fires that broke out – most caused by cooking stoves being toppled – and there are stories of people being burned alive as they fled because their feet sank into the melted tar of roads.