The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine

The magnitude 7.9 Great Kanto Earthquake killed nearly 150,000, and threw Japan’s nerve center of Tokyo and the surrounding Kanto plain into chaos. From this chaos came some of the early steps leading to the militarism of the following decades, and in contrast a flowering of local culture. One such flowering, little-known today, was the emergence of a nation-wide circuit of lady sumo wrestlers.