Books: Disaster

Two MINUTES TO NOON (191 pp.) —Noel F. Busch—Simon & Schuster ($4.95).

At 58 minutes and 46 seconds past 110n the morning of Sept. 1, 1923, Mayor Hidejiro Nagata of Tokyo noticed that the electric light that hung from his ceiling had begun to swing from side to side. “Ah,” said the mayor, “earthquake!”

Reconstructing the event in this latest addition to the growing you-were-there genre of nonfiction (Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, Walter Lord’s A Night to

Remember), Author Noel F. Busch addresses himself in detail to the cause of the lamp’s swaying—and the fearful hours and days that followed it. It was “the beginning of the Kanto Daishinsai, or Great Kanto Earthquake Disaster, which was not only the most destructive earthquake ever recorded but also, in all probability, the most serious natural calamity in the long and frequently calamitous history of the human race.” The earthquake and the succeeding tornado-whipped fires killed an estimated 140,000 persons in Tokyo and nearby Yokohama. The great fires; known historically as the “Flowers of Edo,” destroyed nearly seven square miles of downtown Tokyo, an area, Busch estimates, that was “not quite twice the area covered by the great London. Chicago and San Francisco fires put together.”

A TIME associate editor in the ’30s and a LIFE senior writer in the ’40s, Busch visited Japan to interview survivors of the disaster. Even so, he has had to pad his pages with ruminations about earthquake phenomena and Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the Imperial Hotel, which withstood the shock and created a legend that made the architect’s international reputation. The legend neglected to point out that 99% of Tokyo’s buildings actually rode out the tremors, if not the fire.

Busch uses the same narrative style adopted by John Hersey in Hiroshima: he follows one man or a family through their ordeal. But Two Minutes to Noon has little of the quiet compassion that made Hersey’s book so compelling. In fact, from time to time Busch seems to be studying ants struggling in a bottle. He describes the plight of the Japanese crowding onto the same bridge from opposite sides of the river as “an interesting tactical development.” Many who sought refuge on the bridge died there.

The main character of the book, whom Busch treats with complete sympathy, is Dr. Eikichi Ikeguchi, who was trapped with his wife and three children. In a matter of minutes his family was dead.

The doctor was burned severely—he lost both of his ears—but somehow survived. On March 10, 1945, when the U.S. B-295 brought to bloom another Flower of Edo that killed 100.000, Dr. Ikeguchi recalled which way the flames had spread in 1923. He survived with no trouble.