| Summary/Abstract |
During the immediate aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923, a mass killing of Chinese immigrants took place at the same time as the historically more notorious Korean massacre. This Chinese lynching aroused great concern among high-ranking Taishō officials, for it could have ruined the Foreign Ministry’s effort to reduce anti-Japanese sentiment in North America. Meanwhile, the warlord governments and intellectuals in China defined the incident as a violation of Chinese national sovereignty, thus demanding apologies and compensation from the Japanese authorities. Complementing existing English-language studies of the Kantō Massacre, which pay little heed to the Chinese victims, this article not only examines the role of martial law, ethnic discrimination and exclusionist labor policies in provoking a post-earthquake lynching, but also probes the common ways the Japanese government and the Chinese public assessed this incident. It argues that the massacre encapsulated a great convergence of three historical trajectories: the construction of Japanese national identity, Korean and Chinese labor migration to Japan, and the subjugation of human life to sovereign power.
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