Abstract
When people lost their residences due to some disasters, like war raids, big fires or earthquakes, they move in search of new residences. These migrations clearly show the social relations the sufferers have.
Tokyo suffered a great damage by the Kwanto earthquake on September 1, 1923. Right after the earthquake, the population of Tokyo was diminished by 910 thousand. The number of the sufferers was 1, 673, 981 (including 68, 660 dead). It was estimated that the sufferers who moved out of Tokyo were 800 thousand. They scattered on the whole areas of Japan relying on their blood relation to their native land, and some of them depending on their place relation to their native prefectures.
Figure 2 shows the population movement in Tokyo before and after the earthquake. And the central figure illustrates that some sufferers remained in Tokyo.
In the case of Sendai many sufferers remained in the city after the destruction by air-raids in 1945. These sufferers remaining in thier city are the city dwellers since several generations and so they have the social relation (chiefly blood relation) within the city.
The existence of such relation is shown in Figure 3, which is the distribution of sufferers at the time of Niigata earthquake. For example in Nishi Niigata area there lived 260 sufferers at the end of June, 1964, including 61 sufferers from Nishi Niigata Shimo area and 29 from Sekiya. Out of the sufferers in Nishi Niigata, 23 moved to Sekiya and 9 to Nishi Niigata Shimo (left of Fig. 3). Moreover, the blood relation within the city shows the relation between the newly developed area and the old city core.
