http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Joshua-Hammer-on-In-Sicily-Defying-the-Mafia.html
Born in New York and educated at Princeton University, Joshua Hammer spent fifteen years as a Newsweek foreign correspondent and Bureau Chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Cape Town. During this period, Hammer covered conflicts on four continents: the U.S. engagement in Somalia in 1993-1994, the Rwandan genocide; anarchy and civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the mid 1990s; the civil war in Colombia; the Kosovo War of 1998-1999; the Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada; the U.S. invasion of Iraq; the conflict between Pakistan-backed Islamist guerrillas and the Indian Army in Kashmir; the war in Afghanistan. He also wrote three books during this time, including a memoir about his brother's embrace of Hasidic Judaism, Chosen By God: A Brother's Journey, a finalist for the 2000 Los Angeles Times Non Fiction Prize; A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place (2003), about one town caught up in the Palestinian uprising; and a recreation of the devastating 1923 earthquake that destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama, Yokohama Burning: The Deadly Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II. In June 2006 Hammer left Newsweek and became a full time freelance correspondent, based in Berlin. Hammer is a contributing editor to Smithsonian and Outside magazines, and contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Conde Nast Traveler, Fast Company, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications.
Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II [Hardcover]
Joshua Hammer (Author)
Book Description
Publication Date: August 29, 2006
Yokohama Burning is the story of the worst natural disaster of the twentieth century: the earthquakes, fires, and tsunamis of September 1923 that destroyed Yokohama and most of Tokyo and killed 140,000 people during two days of horror.
With cinematic vividness and from multiple perspectives, acclaimed Newsweek correspondent Joshua Hammer re-creates harrowing scenes of death, escape, and rescue. He also places the tumultuous events in the context of history and demonstrates how they set Japan on a path to even greater tragedy.
At two minutes to noon on Saturday, September 1, 1923, life in the two cities was humming along at its usual pace. An international merchant fleet, an early harbinger of globalization, floated in Yokohama harbor and loaded tea and silk on the docks. More than three thousand rickshaws worked the streets of the port. Diplomats, sailors, spies, traders, and other expatriates lunched at the Grand Hotel on Yokohama's Bund and prowled the dockside quarter known as Bloodtown. Eighteen miles north, in Tokyo, the young Prince Regent, Hirohito, was meeting in his palace with his advisers, and the noted American anthropologist Frederick Starr was hard at work in his hotel room on a book about Mount Fuji. Then, in a mighty shake of the earth, the world as they knew it ended.
When the temblor struck, poorly constructed buildings fell instantly, crushing to death thousands of people or pinning them in the wreckage. Minutes later, a great wall of water washed over coastal resort towns, inundating people without warning. Chemicals exploded, charcoal braziers overturned, neighborhoods of flimsy wooden houses went up in flames. With water mains broken, fire brigades could only look on helplessly as the inferno spread.
Joshua Hammer searched diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts and conducted interviews with nonagenarian survivors to piece together a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe. But the author offers more than a disaster narrative. He details the emerging study of seismology, the nascent wireless communications network that alerted the world, and the massive, American-led relief effort that seemed to promise a bright new era in U.S.-Japanese relations.
Hammer shows that the calamity led in fact to a hardening of racist attitudes in both Japan and the United States, and drove Japan, then a fledgling democracy, into the hands of radical militarists with imperial ambitions. He argues persuasively that the forces that ripped through the archipelago on September 1, 1923, would reverberate, traumatically, for decades to come.
Yokohama Burning, a story of national tragedy and individual heroism, combines a dramatic narrative and historical perspective that will linger with the reader for a long time.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Shortly before noon on September 1, 1923, a massive earthquake and devastating fire destroyed Yokohama and parts of Tokyo, and killed over 140,000 people. Using vigorous prose, Newsweek journalist Hammer (A Season in Bethlehem) skillfully sets the sociopolitical stage for the catastrophe, drawing a picture of Japan's rapid economic growth, Westernization and integration into the world community. However, underneath this veneer of progress lurked a growing militaristic, xenophobic impulse. While the mass death that followed the quake is bad enough, Hammer describes in grisly detail the wanton killing of Korean immigrants by roving bands of sword-wielding Japanese. Following the chaos of the disaster, in Hammer's telling, the forces of imperialism took increasing control of the nation's agenda, and Japan began its march to war with the West. Too much of Hammer's recounting comes from the observations of outsiders: American and British diplomats, scientists and world travelers. One wishes there were a more nuanced treatment of the average Japanese who were crushed, burned or hacked to death as a result of this cataclysm. Instead they are swallowed up in Hammer's big-picture rendition. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Sept. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The devastation of Yokohama and Tokyo in Japan in 1923 is one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. The eyewitness accounts quoted by Hammer, a Newsweek -foreign--affairs journalist, stagger the imagination. The earthquake obliterated Japan's expatriate community, and its absence in ensuing years was one less restraint on Japan's expansionist tendencies prior to World War II. The foreign presence in Yokohama provides Hammer's prelude to chronicling the earthquake of September 1, 1923. Through the eyes of numerous survivors, such as the American naval attache, a missionary, then-famed anthropologist Frederick Starr, a captain of an ocean liner, and several Japanese and Koreans, Hammer portrays the frightful sight of a wave visibly rippling across the cityscape, collapsing buildings and igniting a firestorm. A xenophobic massacre of Koreans, a portent of future atrocities, also occurred. Buried beneath the modern cities and their second destruction in WWII, the memory of this tragedy is capably restored by Hammer. Gilbert Taylor
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive Study of Japan's 1923 Earthquake, June 8, 2010
By Dr. Watson - See all my reviews
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Joshua Hammer has pulled out all the stops with this new and timely book about the 1923 earthquake that struck Yokohama. It is an extensive review of events prior to the quake, with details about Akitsune Imamura, later Chairman of the Seismology Department, Tokyo Imperial University, who correctly predicted the coming horror. I like this book, because it gives the reader a before and after look at all the key players involved, including the embassy and Naval personnel, U.S. professors, and other well-known travelers of that day, whose involvement is important to the story. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's hotel, which was built to withstand an earthquake, plays a prominent part of the story. Hammer has done significant research that is written in a style which can be understood by academic and layman alike. When detail is needed about how the science of Seismology was developed, it is not so technical, that one cannot understand it. Foreshadowing the Japanese militaristic movement and the massacre of Koreans that followed in the wake of the earthquake by the Japanese, is important to the story. I also liked the link drawn between what happened then, in the diplomatic aftermath, and our current world situation via the current U.S. involvement in humanitarian missions. This is an indispensible resource for the student of pre-Pearl Harbor intelligence: it includes the sidebar stories of spy intrigue that was going on prior to the quake. The author's footnotes are extensive and his sources are well-mined for all the included rich detail. My highest recommendation.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, Limited & Flawed, July 27, 2008
By David M. Dougherty (Arkansas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II (Hardcover)
The author has produced a fine disaster story of a event usually overlooked in English literature, but unfortunately he views the disaster from the confines of the Yokohama foreign community, most specifically American, rather than from the Japanese themselves. Nonetheless, his portrayal of the society present in Japan in 1923 is informative, particularly with regard to the Japanese attitudes towards foreigners who were often seen as barbarians.
Unfortunately, the author takes a sharp turn left and loses me when he contends that the American racial attitudes and National Origins Act of 1924 destroyed the goodwill built up between Japan and the US and "... many historians argue, hastened Japan's rejection of the West." Wow!
Prior to the earthquake Japan sought to limit foreign contacts and influence in Japan by confining foreigners to what was essentially an enclave in Yokohama, severely restricting movement by foreigners, their ownership of property and business activities in Japan, and closely watching foreigners to the point that the Imperial Government, by no means a democracy, knew where every foreigner was at almost all times. Japan was hardly moving toward democracy and liberalism as the author contends, but was fully consumed in its militarism, fascism and xenophobia. Even today, a prime element in Japanese culture is its xenophobia, played out by limiting Western business activities in Japan and rejecting free trade. Nonetheless, the author contends that it was the US through seeking to limit Japanese immigration into the US that sent Japan on the road to World War II. Not to belabor the point, but when Senator Johnson said that Japan was "the Germany of Asia" as the author bemoans, where did he go wrong?
Like some other reviewers, I have to recommend Seidensticker's "Tokyo Rising" to put the development of Japan during this period towards World War II in proper perspective. Perhaps the definitive work is the five volume series published by the Columbia University Press, "Japan's Road to the Pacific War."
Ignoring the "Blame America" politics, the book is what it is, an interesting read for an evening or two.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting if Incomplet Account of a Little Known Event, August 5, 2007
By Philip A. True (Fairfax, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II (Hardcover)
The author relates the events of the deadly 1923 earthquake centered on Yokohama and extending to Tokyo primarily through the eyes of the American colony in Yokohama, particularly the US Navy attache, and American rescue attempts following the disaster. These accounts are intersperced with Japanese newspaper stories of the earthquake and the aftermath, but there is little attempt to rely on accounts of Japanese citizens to this tragedy. Hammer brings in the turning of the Japanese on the Korean minority and attempts to suggest the event and America's part, though primarily a rescue operation, was a contributing factor in strengthening the rise of the militarists in Japan. This seems overdone inasmuch as there is little attempt to probe deeper into the complex reasons that Japanese foreign policy evolved during the 1920s and 1930s into the expansionis forays into China and, eventually, against the United States. An interesting, but more or less of a sampling, of Japan during a formative period.
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Problematic, to say the least, July 6, 2007
By Prof. in TX (TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II (Hardcover)
YOKOHAMA BURNING is a fine disaster yarn in the same tradition of ISAAC'S STORM or THE GREAT DELUGE. However, as a work of history, especially Japanese history, the book's promotional materials are deceptive. YOKOHAMA BURNING deals primarily with the experiences of foreigners during the Yokohama earthquake...an interesting topic, certainly, but the book almost entirely ignores the Japanese, who clearly made up the majority of the victims. As a reader, I questioned whether the author spoke Japanese or had done any research into Japanese sources.
Moreover, the book's claim that this event leads to Japan's militarism is both facecious and unproven. Again, perhaps if the author had done more work with the experience of the Japanese citizenry he might have been able to construct this point.
So, what are we left with? If you like disaster tales then this book is fine(thus the two star rating instead of one). However, anyone looking for a serious and engaging work of history will be sorely disappointed. If you are interested in this topic I suggest Edward Sidensticker's TOKYO RISING, an entertaining, informative and comprehensive examination of the earthquake and the times which followed it (In fact, this book quotes Sidensticker...and made me wonder why, if the author read TOKYO RISING, he still wrote this work).
In short, a great disappointment.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars A Forerunner For The Near Future?, May 3, 2007
By E. Beaver "bored_sailor" (Yokosuka, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II (Hardcover)
Tying together the declining hopes for democracy in Japan after the hub of foreigners in Yokohama was wiped out by the earthquake amid the eruption of social violence against Koreans by government sanctioned vigilantes, Hammer makes an intriguing historical argument. A lack of follow through on evidence of related change combined with a flawed narrative that focuses entirely too much on the foreigners, especially relatively obscure ones, rather than the Japanese themselves, sinks the book at times.
Hammer spends ample time on the amazing relief effort mounted by America (primarily) to respond to the disaster, including the mobilizing of the Asiatic Fleet to sail into Japanese waters with abundant relief supplies and an open hand of friendship to the Japanese people, yet only in passing explains the hostility among many Americans towards Japan from before the quake and certainly after the false media reports claiming Japanese arrogance in the face of the unprecedented relief effort. Nevertheless, its a richly detailed and fascinating read about a disaster that may be a forerunner for the caliber of devastation to be seen in seismic risk sectors like Caracas, Venezuela and Tehran, Iran, to say nothing of dozens of other supercities horizontally spread far and wide with slums packed with millions of teeming masses.
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3 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Been there, January 10, 2007
By M. Farmer (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II (Hardcover)
My husband and family used to live in Yokahama and they loved the book.
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