1923 Great Kantō earthquake space in which an estimated 38,000 people were killed by a single fire tornado. The park houses a Buddhist-style memorial hall/museum, a memorial bell donated by Taiwanese Buddhists, a memorial to the victims of World War II Tokyo air raids, and a memorial to the Korean victims of the vigilante killings. In Yasunari Kawabata's 1930 novel "The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa" several chapters deal with the Great Kantō earthquake. In "Japan Sinks", in one scene in the book, due to the fast-moving subduction of the Pacific and Eurasian plates, the Sagami Trough ruptures in a magnitude-8.5 earthquake, killing several million
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1922) and "A Serpent's Lust" (1923) (based on the story of the same title by Ueda Akinari, which was, in part, the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji's 1953 masterpiece "Ugetsu monogatari"). Some have argued that Tanizaki's relation to cinema is important to understanding his overall career. Tanizaki's reputation began to take off in 1923, when he moved to Kyoto after the Great Kanto earthquake, which destroyed his house in Yokohama (at the time Tanizaki was on a bus in Hakone and thus escaped injury). The loss of Tokyo's historic buildings and neighborhoods in the quake triggered a change in his enthusiasms,