1943 Tottori earthquake

What Happened

At 17:36 local time on September 10, 1943, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Tottori prefecture on the Japan Sea coast of western Honshu. The epicentre lay offshore from Ketaka District, at coordinates 35.47°N, 134.09°E — ground that is now part of Tottori city itself. The shaking reached a seismic intensity of 6 in Tottori city and was felt as far away as Okayama, across the Inland Sea.

The centre of Tottori city took the worst of it. The district was dense with antiquated wooden buildings, and an estimated 80 per cent of its structures were damaged or destroyed. The timing made the damage worse: the quake hit in the evening, when most kitchens already had fires lit for the evening meal. Fires broke out at 16 locations around the city. Water mains had ruptured, so residents formed bucket brigades — passing containers of water hand to hand — to stop the flames from spreading.

The death toll was 1,083. Among the dead were numerous Zainichi Koreans, ethnic Koreans living in Japan, who worked in the nearby Aragane Copper Mines.

Background

The Tottori earthquake struck in the 18th year of the Shōwa era (昭和, しょうわ), the reign period of Emperor Hirohito that ran from 1926 to 1989. By September 1943, Japan was deep into the Second World War, and the government exercised strict control over what newspapers and radio could report about military and industrial matters.

Disaster news, however, was not censored in this case. Reports of the destruction in Tottori circulated openly, and relief volunteers and supplies arrived from many parts of the Empire of Japan — including Manchukuo, the Japanese-controlled state in northeast China. That flow of aid across the empire's wartime transport network was itself unusual for a period when most resources were being directed to the war effort.

The region had already been restless that year. Two earthquakes of magnitude 6.2 struck the same area on March 4 and March 5, 1943, but neither caused significant damage. The September event was a far larger rupture on the same seismic zone.

Why It Mattered

The destruction of roughly 80 per cent of central Tottori's buildings in a single evening made this one of the most damaging earthquakes of the wartime period. The firestorm risk was acute: with 16 separate ignition points and a broken water supply, the city's survival depended on residents organising themselves into bucket brigades rather than on any functioning infrastructure.

The death toll of 1,083 reflects both the collapse of older wooden housing and the fires that followed. The inclusion of Zainichi Korean mineworkers among the dead points to the labour structure of wartime Japan, in which Koreans — many of them conscripted or working under harsh conditions — staffed mines and heavy industry. The Aragane Copper Mines near Tottori were one such workplace.

The earthquake also demonstrated that even under wartime censorship, a domestic natural disaster of this scale could not be hidden. Aid arriving from Manchukuo and elsewhere in the empire was public knowledge, and the event entered the record as a national, not merely local, calamity.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name of the disaster is 鳥取地震.

• Kana reading: とっとりじしん
• Romaji: Tottori jishin

Breaking the name down character by character:

鳥 — read tori here. The character means "bird." It is the first element of the place name Tottori.

取 — read tori here as well. It means "to take" or "to grasp." Together, 鳥取 (Tottori) is the name of the prefecture and its capital city on the Japan Sea coast. The place name is written with these two kanji and is not related in meaning to the phrase "bird taking"; it is simply how the name is conventionally spelled.

地 — read ji. It means "ground," "earth," or "land." This character appears in many Japanese terms relating to geography and geology.

震 — read shin. It means "shake," "tremble," or "quake." It is the standard character for seismic events.

Put together, 地震 (jishin) is the ordinary Japanese word for "earthquake" — literally "earth shake." The full name 鳥取地震 therefore means "the Tottori earthquake," following the standard Japanese pattern of placing the place name first and 地震 second. Readers will meet this same pattern in names such as 関東地震 (Kantō jishin, the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake) and 阪神地震 (Hanshin jishin, used for the 1995 Kobe earthquake). The word 地震 is one of the most useful compounds a student of Japanese can learn, because it appears constantly in news reports, disaster warnings, and historical writing.

Key Figures

The facts of the 1943 Tottori earthquake do not record named individuals in connection with the event. The significant actors were collective: the residents of Tottori city who formed bucket brigades after the water mains failed, the 1,083 people who died, including Zainichi Korean workers from the Aragane Copper Mines, and the relief volunteers and supply convoys sent from across the Empire of Japan, including from Manchukuo. The earthquake itself occurred during the reign of Emperor Hirohito, in the 18th year of the Shōwa era.