Bureau of Social Affairs Home Office, Japan

The Japanese Home Office’s Bureau of Social Affairs used maps to document the physical and human consequences of the 1923 earthquake. Antique maps by the Bureau of Social Affairs, Home Office, Japan represented here were published in 1926 with its official account and companion diagrams. Tokyo, Yokohama, Tokyo Bay and Sagami Bay appear through damage distribution, fire areas and changes to land and seabed. Other sheets concern landslides, households affected, emergency accommodation and the number and distribution of relief recipients. Areas placed under martial law add an administrative dimension to the record. The collection is therefore an institutional account of disaster, combining the altered physical landscape with the organisation of public assistance. Its maps describe the earthquake through several kinds of evidence, giving social statistics and relief arrangements a place alongside the more immediately visible geography of destruction.