Gennifer Weisenfeld and Charles Schencking have written similar yet distinguishable books. As highly capable mid-career scholars able to combine weighty arguments with limpid prose, Weisenfeld and Schencking employ their talents to explore the same topic—the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923—through different methodological approaches. Both scholars chart chronologically the unfolding of the calamity and its aftermath. They both interpret the earthquake as a natural disaster that generated social, cultural, and political aftershocks, but they draw different conclusions regarding the earthquake's significance. Taken together, these two books illuminate an understudied moment of magnitude in Taishō-era Japan and raise provocative questions about the writing of 1920s history.
As an art historian with an allegiance to the methods and insights of cultural history, Weisenfeld employs images of all sorts—photographs, seismographs, postcards, prints, paintings, maps, bar graphs, political cartoons—to interpret the earthquake's importance. After a chapter on the premodern history of earthquakes in Japan, Weisenfeld...
