ON SEPTEMBER 1st, 1923, a powerful earthquake struck Tokyo. My grandmother, Kimi Kawabata, was twelve years old. Terrified by the shaking, she ran out of her house in the upscale Shibuya district and into the street. The Great Kanto Earthquake, as it came to be called, measured 7.9 on the Richter scale, felling houses into splinters, rending water mains. But the Kawabata house in Shibuya was lucky. It was still standing when the tremors subsided.

The quake struck at 11:58 AM. Within minutes, lunchtime fires had become unstoppable conflagrations. The area would burn for two days. Over a million people lost their homes. 140,000 died. But the Kawabatas' luck held. Their house did not burn down. They all survived.

Family lore has it that on the day of the earthquake the Kawabatas were expecting out-of-town relatives. They were from Kagoshima, the Kawabatas' ancestral home, a city about 600 miles southwest of Tokyo. Kagoshima is well-known for a number of things—for Sakurajima, the very active volcano poised over the city and its bay; for Saigo Takamori, the real "last samurai," a leader of the ill-fated Satsuma Rebellion; and for being home to Kagoshima-ben, a dialect notorious for being difficult to understand. I don't know how close the Kagoshima relatives got to the devastation of Tokyo before their train stopped. Close enough that they did not turn around.

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Disasters breed disease, confusion, rumors, mobs. Afterwards people say: It was a chaotic time. People were afraid. As if this confers absolution. But atrocities are rarely grassroots events. The history of the 20th century is littered with instances of so-called mob violence that were in truth incited and abetted by the authorities. Think Kristallnacht. Think Rwandan genocide. In the days following the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Japanese government fomented rumors that resident Koreans, Chinese, and political radicals were looting, setting fires to remaining homes, and poisoning wells. Newspapers reported this as fact. The military, police, and civilian self-defense groups were authorized to take any action they deemed necessary to maintain order.

For days people were rounded up, herded into trucks, dumped into rivers, murdered by neighbors, and killed at police stations where they'd fled for protection. Six thousand Korean men, women, and children died in the massacre, as well as hundreds of Chinese laborers, and scores of known anarchists.

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Someone once said that a language is just a dialect with an army. The relatives from Kagoshima somehow made it to Tokyo that week, but were stopped at a checkpoint. Their Japanese sounded funny. Are you Korean? they were asked. No, they said. Prove it, the guards told them. Say ra ri ru re ro.

Ra ri ru re ro. It doesn't mean anything. The Japanese syllabary consists of 51 syllables that, separately and in combination, account for every sound it is possible to make in Japanese. It begins with the vowels: a i u e o. The next line is ka ki ku ke ko. And on it goes in its sing-songy way, each line adding a consonant, until one gets to this line, the killer line: ra ri ru re ro. The conventional romanization renders this sound as an "r", but it's some hybrid of "r" and "l" and "d" and yet not that either. Few non-native speakers can pronounce it correctly. But all native speakers, regardless of provincial dialect, can make this sound. Even speakers of Kagoshima-ben can say ra ri ru re ro. The relatives from Kagoshima passed the test; they were allowed safe passage to Shibuya. They'd been saved by five syllables.

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I grew up hearing the ra ri ru re ro story from my mother. Nothing was said of Koreans or massacres. It was a comical anecdote about the impossible Kagoshima dialect.

My sister and I are half Japanese. We lived in Japan until she was four and I nearly six, when we moved to the US. In the faithless and adaptable way of children, we promptly forgot our Japanese in our rush to become Americans. We put on the English language like a set of new clothes. It was that easy. But we never forgot how to say ra ri ru re ro.

I have two children of my own now. They don't look Japanese at all. But my sister calls me and says, Do you speak to them in Japanese? Can they say it? Make sure they can say ra ri ru re ro.


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