As it should be, the 1906 earthquake is always marked on April 18, but we rarely take the time to think much about the 7.9 earthquake beyond its anniversary.
In the days following the quake, the 20-year-old Chiura Obata, who had only been in the country for three years, grabbed his sketchbook and went to work. The Asian Art Museum’s 2022 exhibition, “Bearing Witness: Selected Works by Chiura Obata,” showcased the firsthand depictions.
“The watercolors in this series begin on April 25, exactly a week after the earthquake and three days after the raging fires subsided,” the museum wrote of the exhibit. “Binding holes across the top of the paper show that the pages were once part of a sketchbook — perhaps the same one Obata grabbed on the morning of the earthquake, when the twenty-year-old artist fled his wrecked lodgings on Leavenworth Street.”…