Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition by Hideyuki Kikuchi Read Free Book Online Page B

had been merged into a single city. It covered seven square miles or approximately 4,500 acres. At the turn of the millennium, its population reached 270,000.
    Shinjuku station occupied the city center. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex, Kabuki-cho, Hanazono, and the five buildings of the skyscraper district comprised the heart of the new city and its world-renowned shopping and entertainment district. The flow of the young and the adventurous went on all day and all night—until that fall night of September thirteenth.
    That day, the entirety of Shinjuku—indeed, only Shinjuku—was leveled by a magnitude 8.5 earthquake directly beneath the city. Even worse, it struck like a surprise attack at three o’clock in the morning.
    Since the 1980s, preparing for the next predicted “big one” to strike Tokyo—predicted to occur around the Izu Peninsula—the building codes had been modified to increase the earthquake resistance of the architecture. But the solidly-built reinforced steel and concrete structures and prefabricated residential wooden houses crumbled like papier-mâché in the face of this earthquake.
    The pedestrians and homeowners sleeping soundly in their beds, the night-life revelers—all that concrete and steel became an avalanche that swept them away unmercifully and without distinction.
    In a “normal” earthquake, the fires sparked in residential housing often posed a bigger threat than the collapsing structures. In this earthquake alone, eighty percent of the dead were killed in the first heave of the earth. There were no aftershocks.
    Even the Japan Meteorological Agency abandoned the designation “Great Shinjuku Earthquake” in favor of “Devil Quake,” as the latter perfectly captured its nature and effect, unlike any that had come before.
    First of all, the damage did not extend any further than Shinjuku proper.
    For example, the Chuo line running from Ichigaya to Iidabashi was bordered on the east by Chiyoda Ward and on the west by Shinjuku Ward. The station employees on duty at Iidabashi could look across the outer moat of the Imperial Palace towards the soaring structures of Ichigaya and watch as they collapsed with a deafening roar, while on their side of the moat not even the air stirred.
    They slapped their cheeks, thinking they must be dreaming—that’s how they described the experience. As a result, even when the information was relayed to the fire and police departments, they didn’t take it seriously at first, delaying the rescue operations. The Devil Quake was clearly limited to Shinjuku. Or rather, it specifically targeted Shinjuku.
    Even within Shinjuku, the wreckage was distributed in a random fashion. The Isetan Mitsukoshi, Odakyu and Keio station department stores were leveled, while the Keio Plaza Hotel, the Sumitomo Bank “triangle” building and the rest of the Shinjuku skyscraper district suffered little more than cracks in the walls and broken windows.
    When the “big one” hit, Chuo Park, a stone’s throw away—despite being designated as an evacuation center—saw trees and shrubs yanked out by the roots, the ground tossed like the waves of the sea, as if the gods of the earth had gone mad and bolted for the surface.
    Elsewhere, the pleasure quarters of Kabuki-cho and Hanazono presented the cruel irony of flattened wooden residences while the surrounding buildings managed to maintain their outward appearances.
    At the same time, the Shinjuku Ward Building, the Koma Theater and the Pension Fund Association Building had their facades stripped away, but remained standing.
    It was as if a giant catfish buried deep in the sludge had woken up and haphazardly thrashed about without rhyme or reason.
    Had the destruction been confined to such irrationally distributed damage alone, the epithets of “Devil Quake” and “Demon City” should not have stuck. The portents were