How Did an Earthquake Become News in Edo?

A news seller in a satirical print of 1855 makes an uncomfortable admission. Without fires, earthquakes, and other public commotions, he says, his trade would starve. The University of Tokyo's catalogue identifies him among workers and merchants giving thanks to the earthquake catfish for their new prosperity.^[1]

This is a character speaking inside a print, not a journalist confessing in an interview. That distinction makes the joke sharper. The people selling accounts of the disaster could themselves become part of the story told about it.

The earthquake struck Edo on 11 November 1855, the second day of the tenth month in the Japanese calendar then in use. Destruction and fires created an urgent subject for print.^[2] But there was no single account waiting to be copied. A list of damaged places, a story of a family's escape, and a picture blaming a giant fish answered different questions.

Following those answers reveals how a disaster became public knowledge before the modern daily newspaper. News was made through selection, arrangement, and sale. It also shared the page with other things people wanted when the ground could no longer be trusted.

An earthquake gives people a common event without giving them a common view. Someone can know what happened to a house and remain uncertain about another district. Reports have to connect those separate experiences before the city becomes imaginable as a damaged whole.

The broadsides conventionally called kawaraban supplied one way of making that connection. Surviving sheets catalogued by the Disaster Prevention Library identify places affected by the shaking and subsequent fires. Their titles promise an overview, a detailed account, or a survey of locations. One carries a note dating its revision to the twenty-eighth day of the tenth month.^[3]

A revision date does important work. It distinguishes the event being described from the moment at which an account claims to have been brought up to date. The earthquake occurred on the second day; information about it could still be assembled or revised weeks afterward. A printed sheet was not necessarily an instantaneous response delivered on the night named in its heading.

Nor was a declaration of detail a guarantee of accuracy. It was a claim made to a prospective reader. Titles emphasizing investigation and correction indicate that reliability could be advertised, even where we cannot reconstruct every source behind the publication.

Useful information could concern what happened next. Another catalogued sheet notes three relief shelters, including one at Asakusa Hirokōji.^[4] The subject extends beyond a record of damage. It locates a response within the affected city.

That difference helps explain why disaster information had value. Knowing that a neighborhood burned and knowing where assistance had been established were related but distinct pieces of knowledge. A publisher could bring them into the same account. The sheet's usefulness depended on what it selected as much as on the fact that it concerned a dramatic event.

Alongside these accounts appeared namazu-e, catfish prints. Their shared figure drew upon a familiar religious image: the deity of Kashima holding down a subterranean catfish with a great stone. When restraint failed, the creature's movement explained the shaking within that story.^[5]

The figure gave an invisible disturbance a body that could be confronted. People could accuse it, demand an apology, punish it, or thank it. Those possibilities made the catfish useful for discussing consequences as well as causes.

The historian Gregory Smits emphasizes this flexibility. His account places the prints within an existing culture of symbolic commentary and wordplay. The catfish could carry several meanings rather than function as a straightforward illustration of what every resident believed was happening underground.^[6]

That distinction prevents an easy division between factual news and a population supposedly distracted by superstition. A person could recognize a joke involving the fish without treating the joke as a complete explanation of earthquakes. Equally, the use of humor does not establish that religious concern had vanished. A picture could invoke a sacred protector and make an irreverent comment about human behavior on the same occasion.

The news seller's speech belongs to this mixed language. His gratitude is directed toward the figure blamed for destruction. The contradiction exposes a commercial interest: an event disastrous for one person can provide work for somebody else. The printer places that observation in the mouth of a seller whose own business depends on other people's demand to hear about trouble.

This does not measure the seller's actual profits or establish the attitude of every worker. It makes a relationship available for discussion. News production is no longer outside the damaged city, neutrally describing it. It belongs among the trades whose circumstances the earthquake has altered.

Other prints used the theater to give the event a recognizable shape. In one example described by the National Museum of Japanese History, a catfish takes the place of a man haunted by the ghost of a courtesan. The parody draws on Keisei Asamagatake, a kabuki play in which a broken relationship returns as an accusation. In the earthquake version, the courtesan has died in the Yoshiwara disaster.^[7]

The borrowed scene brings an emotional structure with it. A ghost is not simply another casualty added to a list. She returns to demand attention from someone implicated in her suffering. Recasting the roles allows the catastrophe to be approached through resentment and an unsettled obligation.

That does different work from locating a relief shelter. It asks what the dead might have to say, rather than where the living should go. The scene is invented, but the distinction between its fiction and its subject does not make it historically empty. It shows one way an audience was invited to respond to the disaster.

Parody also depends on prior knowledge. Recognizing the theatrical source gives a viewer more to work with than recognizing a fish. A known character, relationship, or episode can supply meaning without a long explanation. The publication addresses people as members of a cultural world they already share.

This helps explain the range of earthquake print beyond a single comic tone. A borrowed scene could make the disaster amusing, accusatory, or mournful. Humor need not mean that the victims were forgotten; an imaginary confrontation could insist that somebody answer for them.

The claim remains about the work's invitation, not a recovered reaction from every buyer. What survives is a device for making recent catastrophe legible through an older story. The news entered forms of attention that had existed before the news.

Longer books assembled the earthquake differently. Hattori Yasunori's Ansei kenmonroku, published in three volumes in 1856, included episodes emphasizing duties toward parents. The National Archives describes accounts of a filial daughter leaving a keepsake before death and children encountering disaster after fleeing ahead of their parents.^[8]

The selection makes family conduct part of the event's meaning. A disaster that scattered households could be narrated as a test of obligations within them. A reader was being offered examples to remember, not simply an inventory of collapsed buildings.

There is a serious interpretive risk in this form. When survival and death are arranged as lessons, the narrative can make an outcome appear to confirm a moral principle. The account's purpose must be distinguished from proof that filial conduct determined who lived. The episodes show what the compiler wished readers to consider; their presentation does not establish a just distribution of suffering.

Kanagaki Robun's Ansei kenmonshi took a broader range of reported experiences as its subject. Completed in the earthquake year and published during the Ansei era, it covered damage across Edo, accounts of victims, and supposed warning signs, including changes in catfish behavior and a magnet losing its attraction.^[9]

Those reported signs show people looking backward for something they might recognize before another disaster. They are not evidence that the proposed signs reliably predicted earthquakes. The historical interest lies in the search: what could be extracted from a terrifying experience and made usable for the future?

The two books therefore organize relevance differently. A story about parental duty makes conduct central. An account of a supposed precursor directs attention toward what someone might observe. Both can include descriptions of suffering while drawing readers toward different conclusions about it.

A catastrophe did not decide its own lesson. Compilers selected episodes, placed them together, and offered a framework in which they could be read. That work gave the earthquake an afterlife longer than the first urgent sheet.

A print in Tokyo's Printing Museum promises something still more direct. Catalogued as Jishin no mamori, protection against earthquakes, it includes a catfish's apology before deities. The museum explains that sacred characters on the document were to be cut out and placed on the four sides of a house, with the claim that this would prevent its collapse in another earthquake.^[10]

Here, the printed object offered an action. Its purchaser was not only a reader or spectator. Cutting and positioning part of the sheet would turn the publication into an arrangement within a home.

That intended use changes how the paper should be understood. A complete impression preserved in a collection can look like an image made solely for viewing. Yet the prescribed operation would alter it. The relationship between print and user included the possibility of taking the object apart.

The promise also addressed a different time from the damage reports. A location list concerned a catastrophe already experienced. A protective sheet concerned a catastrophe feared. Both belonged to the aftermath, but one attempted to make the past knowable while the other offered a way of acting toward the future.

The claimed protection remains a religious assurance, not an engineering property established by the sheet. We cannot measure its historical use from the survival of one example. Nevertheless, its instructions make clear why calling every earthquake print an early newspaper would flatten the evidence. Some publications were being offered as instruments of protection.

The range is more interesting than a procession from irrational charm to rational information. The forms coexisted. A household's concern about what had happened elsewhere did not eliminate anxiety about its own roof. Publishers could address those needs through objects with different promised effects.

Information also accumulated away from the print shop. A shogunal retainer named Miyazaki kept a large compilation, Mikikigusa, gathering documents, reports, and writing by himself and others over many years. Its account of the 1855 earthquake places his household near the foot of Kagurazaka in Edo.^[11]

Miyazaki reported that he had prepared for disaster, including setting money aside, because he associated the year's unusual warmth with the possibility of an earthquake. He recorded that his family escaped injury and that his badly damaged residence was quickly repaired. The National Archives draws attention to the satisfaction with which he presented that outcome.^[11]

This is evidence of his account of preparedness, not confirmation that warm weather predicted the event. The distinction between an action and the reason subsequently offered for it matters. Savings could be available for recovery even if the belief prompting them supplied no reliable forecast.

His narrative also locates the earthquake within a particular household's resources. Money reserved in advance and a rapid rebuilding belong to his reported experience. They should not be extended to every family whose house appears on a damage map.

The compilation included other people's catastrophes as well. Personal experience and collected report could sit beside one another without having the same evidential status. A statement about one's own preparations and a story heard about another person's death arrived on the page by different routes.

Miyazaki's collection thus introduces a form of authority distinct from the printed claim to a revised survey. The compiler presents proximity, accumulated knowledge, and personal experience. Those qualities can make an account valuable while also shaping what its author wishes to emphasize.

The earthquake became history through such acts of keeping as well as through acts of sale. Someone selected which reports deserved to remain beside a recollection of his own household. What later readers encounter is already an arrangement made by an earlier reader.

The rapid appearance of catfish prints should not be mistaken for a permanently open publishing system. Smits discusses their anonymity and the authorities' eventual suppression of production. He also explains how allusions and wordplay allowed social commentary to operate less directly than an explicit statement would have done.^[12]

An indirect message asks something of its audience. The reader must recognize what has been substituted, what a name resembles, or why a familiar scene has acquired new participants. This makes understanding partly a shared accomplishment between maker and audience. It can also leave room for more than one interpretation.

But a symbol is not a certificate of opposition to the government. A picture ridiculing a profiteer, invoking divine protection, or comforting a household need not express the same political position. The works should be read for what they actually do, rather than recruited into one unified voice of resistance.

Restrictions on this burst of production did not erase every other way of writing about the earthquake. Hattori's 1856 publication, for example, belongs after the disaster's initial flood of prints. Different kinds of account had different forms and careers. Suppression of one genre cannot stand for the immediate disappearance of the subject.

There is a later filter too. The University of Tokyo's Ishimoto Collection was assembled by Ishimoto Mishio, a director of its Earthquake Research Institute, from disaster-related broadsides and prints.^[13] A modern research collection preserves selections that once circulated under quite different circumstances. It is not a publisher's record of every sale.

The distinction keeps the surviving abundance in proportion. Many preserved designs show a range of responses; they do not disclose how many people accepted each message. Recovering public expression is not the same task as counting public opinion.

Edo's earthquake became news through several conversions. Local damage became a list or overview. A disturbing event became a quarrel with a catfish. A family's fate became an example in a book. Anxiety became a reason to acquire paper intended for protection.

Those conversions made the event shareable without making every account interchangeable. A relief location could guide attention toward assistance. A satire could expose conflicting interests. A moral story could assign significance to conduct. Reading one as though it had promised the work of another would misunderstand both.

The news seller's speech supplies an especially pointed conclusion. He appears inside a commodity whose subject has created customers for his trade. The print asks its audience to notice the interest of the person delivering an account, even while delivering an account of its own.

The city did not need to wait for modern journalism to confront that problem. To know about a disaster beyond one's own doorstep was already to depend on people who selected, interpreted, and circulated information. Some sought to inform; some offered reassurance or amusement; the surviving works show that these purposes could meet on the same sheet. After the ground moved, the work of deciding what the movement meant was still in human hands.