Japan's Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the area around Tokyo and the country's main port of Yokohama. This article uses the earthquake as a case study to inform our understanding of the economics of disasters and the history of market integration. It seeks to test two main assumptions: first, that shifting demand and supply curves consequent on a disaster will have some impact on prices; and second, that any local changes in the disaster region are likely to be diffused across a wider geographical area. We make use of a unique monthly wholesale price dataset for a number of cities across Japan, and our analysis suggests three main findings: that price changes in the affected areas immediately following the disaster were in most cases reflected in price changes in Japan's provincial cities; that cities further away from the devastation witnessed smaller price changes than those nearer to the affected area; and that the observed pattern of price changes reflects the regional heterogeneity identified by scholars who have worked on market integration in Japan.

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Contemporary concerns about the difficulties faced by the Japanese economy following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 soon appeared to be unfounded as the economy recovered relatively quickly. This paper suggests that despite its limited impact on Japan's longer term economic trajectory this disaster can tell us a great deal about the ways in which individuals, organisations and officialdom respond to a devastating event, and help us better to understand the process of transition from immediate relief to longer term recovery, not just in Japan, but more broadly. It analyses the impact of the disaster on market transactions, showing that the scale and nature of market disruption went far beyond direct physical destruction, that the collective and individual responses of government, producers, traders and consumers had the potential to make matters worse, rather than better, and that the existence of integrated markets spread the effects of the disaster across the Japanese archipelago. It also suggests that re-establishing market stability following the crisis was one of the keys to longer term recovery, and further research will help us understand the causal factors in that process.2

A method using murine P-388 leukemia or human HT-29 colon carcinoma cells was developed for the bioautography of potential antitumor agents. Of 18 cancer chemotherapeutic drugs and natural products tested, all were detected by toxicity at 0.01 or 1.0 micrograms with P-388 cells, and 11 of the 18 were detected at 10 micrograms or less with HT-29 cells. Bioautography of a crude extract of Pseudoplexaura wagenaari and subsequent purification yielded the known compound crassin acetate. With modification, the assay detected specifically toxic DNA-binding agents.