Tomorrow, September 1, marks 100 years since the Great Kanto Earthquake. We visited a monument in Kanda-Surugadai that passes down to future generations the memory of the disaster, which brought unprecedented devastation with some 105,000 people dead or missing. The stone monument, about two meters tall, stands beside the exit elevator of Tokyo Metro's Shin-Ochanomizu Station.
The inscription reads "Shinsai Kinen" (Earthquake Memorial). According to the text, while the surrounding area was reduced to scorched earth, the four-story reinforced-concrete Tokyo Shoko Gakko school (now Saitama Institute of Technology) that stood on this site survived the flames and played a major role as a shelter for affected residents and a hub for distributing supplies. In gratitude, local residents planted a single ginkgo tree and erected this monument, the inscription notes.
According to the Home Ministry Social Affairs Bureau's "Record of the Taisho Earthquake" (1926), the toll in the area of present-day Chiyoda Ward (then Kojimachi and Kanda wards) was 95 dead and 42 missing in Kojimachi Ward, and 1,055 dead and 464 missing in Kanda Ward. The share of the population affected by the disaster reached 69.9 percent in Kojimachi Ward and 91.3 percent in Kanda Ward.
The monument stands quietly in a narrow space between buildings. Today, no trace of the great earthquake remains in the area, and the ginkgo tree was nowhere to be found.