The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake was the deadliest natural disaster in Japanese history, but many of its victims died from unnatural causes. In its aftermath, rumors of Korean and Chinese residents setting fires and poisoning wells led to widespread mob violence. The police and Imperial Army took advantage of the chaos to liquidate prominent socialists and anarchists, portending the country’s slide into totalitarianism.
Over the space of a few weeks, an estimated 6,000 people are believed to have been killed, although authorities endeavored to conceal the scale of the slaughter. To this day, it’s still a fiercely contested episode, disputed by revisionist historians and right-wing politicians (including current Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike).
All of this made it exciting to hear that Tatsuya Mori was making a movie about the subject to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the quake. On paper, it seems like a good fit: The recalcitrant documentarian’s films are slippery and provocative, forever complicating the notion of objective truth.