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On September 1, 1923, a magnitude-7.9 earthquake struck the Kantō plain just before noon, when charcoal and gas cooking fires were lit across Tokyo and Yokohama. About 38,000 refugees crowded with their belongings into the open grounds of the former Army Clothing Depot in Tokyo's Honjo district, believing open space meant safety. A fire whirlwind swept through and killed nearly all of them, part of a disaster that left over 100,000 dead.
After the quake, rumors spread that Koreans were poisoning wells and setting fires. Officials repeated the rumors instead of stopping them, and civilian vigilante groups, sometimes with police and army help, killed thousands of Koreans and some Chinese and suspected leftists. Collapse of infrastructure plus existing ethnic contempt turns fear into a hunt for a scapegoat, and the state's quiet acceptance makes the killing feel legitimate.
Influential Japanese figures framed the earthquake as tenken, heaven's punishment for the materialism, individualism and Western-style frivolity of Taishō-era cities. Treating the destruction as a moral verdict gave nationalists a mandate to 'purify' society through discipline, rebuilding and hostility to liberal and foreign influence. The disaster became an argument for authoritarian renewal rather than just a physical rebuilding job.
During the post-quake martial law, military police lieutenant Amakasu Masahiko detained the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, his partner the feminist Itō Noe, and Ōsugi's six-year-old nephew, then had all three strangled and thrown into a well. Amakasu got a light sentence, was released early, and later held a powerful post in Japanese-run Manchukuo. The case shows how emergency conditions let security forces eliminate dissidents with little consequence, normalizing military impunity.