The murderous mayhem following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which resulted in infamous Korean massacres, was most commonly known and commemorated in Japanese at the time using the term Chōsenjin sawagi, which ambiguously evoked a disturbance involving Korean people. Although both Chōsenjin sawagi and “panic” represent contested lenses for viewing the atrocity, this essay revisits the event and its narration through an approach informed by the local multi-semantic sign sawagi and the transnational framework of colonial panic. By highlighting overlooked connections and continuities that run through the vocabularies and stories of a culture of colonial fear and insecurity, it is possible to apprehend the Chōsenjin sawagi as a colonial panic attack that hit the imperial center, but also a revolt against the logic of integrated empire that echoed the 1919 March First Independence Uprising in Korea, another event discursively contained within the framework of sawagi.
