Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [33]
Darkness and Humanity
THE GREAT KANTŌ EARTHQUAKE was a terrifying experience for me, and also an extremely important one. Through it I learned not only of the extraordinary powers of nature, but extraordinary things that lie in human hearts. To begin with, the earthquake overwhelmed me by suddenly transforming my surroundings.
The street where the streetcar ran on the other side of the Edogawa River was badly damaged, heaving with fissures. The river itself had raised its bottom and showed new islands of mud. I didn’t see any fallen houses in the immediate area, but there were leaning ones here and there. The whole Edogawa River district was veiled in a dancing, swirling dust whose grayness gave the sun a pallor like that during an eclipse. The people who stood to the left and right of me in this scene looked for all the world like fugitives from hell, and the whole landscape took on a bizarre and eerie aspect. I stood holding on to one of the young cherry trees planted along the banks of the river, and I was still shaking as I gazed out over the scene, thinking, “This must be the end of the world.”
From that point on, I don’t remember very much about that day. But I do recall that the ground kept on shaking and shaking without respite. And I remember that eventually a billowing mushroom cloud appeared in the eastern sky, gradually towering and spreading to fill half the heavens with the smoke from the fire engulfing central Tokyo.
That night the Yama-no-te hill area, where we were and which escaped the fires, was of course without electricity like the rest of Tokyo. No lamps were lit, but the light from the fire raging in the low-lying downtown section cast an unexpected glow on the hills. That night every household still had candles, so no one was threatened by the darkness. What terrified everyone was the sound of the armory.
The armory grounds, as I have already mentioned, were bounded by a long red brick wall within which the factories stood in rows of huge red brick buildings. This plant served as an unforeseen barrier to the fires advancing from downtown and saved the entire Yama-no-te district. However, the arsenal itself, because it was a storage area for explosives, seems to have been touched off by the heat of the flames licking their way from Kanda to Suidōbashi. From time to time, perhaps ignited by some kind of shell, a column of fire spewed forth from the armory accompanied by a terrifying roar. It was that sound that unnerved people.
In my neighborhood there was actually a man who explained, as if he really believed it, that this sound was volcanoes erupting on the Izu Peninsula a hundred miles south of Tokyo. They were setting off a chain of eruptions, he said, which was heading north toward us. “So if it comes to the worst,” this man continued, “I’m going to pack up what I need and get out of here with this thing.” And he proudly displayed a milk wagon he had found abandoned somewhere.
This little story has its charm and doesn’t really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior. By the time the fires downtown had subsided, everyone had used up all the household candles and the world was plunged into the real darkness of night. People who felt threatened by this darkness became the prey of the most horrifying demagogues and engaged in the most incredibly reckless, lawless acts. It’s impossible even to imagine the magnitude of the terror brought by total darkness to people who have never experienced it before—it is a terror that destroys all reason. When a person can’t see anything to the left or the right, he becomes thoroughly demoralized and confused. And, as the old saying goes, “Fear peoples the darkness with monsters.”
The massacre of Korean residents of Tokyo that took place on the heels of the Great Kanto Earthquake was brought on by demagogues who deftly exploited people’s fear of the darkness. With my own eyes I saw a mob of adults with contorted faces rushing