Yoshibumi Kanda

Yoshibumi Kanda is a survivor figure in the broad sense that disaster history often depends on: the child or young witness whose later memory helps make the scale of destruction legible to later generations. As a Yokohama resident associated with later oral-history testimony, Kanda represents the survivors whose memories do not always enter formal reports but whose recollections preserve the texture of what it felt like to live through the quake and its aftermath. In a disaster this large, survivor memory becomes a form of evidence.

Born in Japan in 1910, Kanda would have been too young to understand the earthquake in terms of policy or seismology. That is precisely why such testimony matters. Children remember sounds, heat, confusion, the sight of adults failing to maintain order, and the sensory facts of survival. The Great Kanto Earthquake was experienced by thousands of children in similar fragments: being carried, separated, directed toward open ground, or hidden in improvised shelter. Those fragments, when collected, tell historians where the official record is thin.

Yokohama’s destruction was severe enough that survival itself often meant displacement. Survivors like Kanda became part of the long aftermath of homelessness, school interruption, and family loss. The earthquake did not end when the fire died. It continued in refugee camps, in the rebuilding of neighborhoods, and in the silence left by absent relatives. A survivor’s later life is therefore part of the disaster’s history, not a separate chapter.

Kanda’s importance also lies in what survivor testimony does for accountability. Large disasters tend to be narrated by institutions, but institutions cannot fully represent lived experience. Personal memory preserves small but revealing facts: what the air smelled like, how people moved, where fear turned to confusion, how long a wait felt. In a documentary history, that texture is not decorative. It is the bridge between the archive and the human being. Kanda’s life reminds us that the survivors of 1923 carried forward not just a memory of ruin, but the responsibility of telling what the city had become when the earth and fire were done with it.