Bearing Witness: Chiura Obata’s “San Francisco after the Earthquake” series

Chiura Obata (1885-1975) was twenty years old at the time of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He had arrived in the city three years earlier from Japan.

Forced to flee his home with only a blanket and some sketchbooks, he set out to document the disaster’s impact on his new hometown.

The massive 7.9 quake struck the city early on the morning of April 18, 1906. Soon after, a fire tore through the downtown area. For four days the fires raged, until finally extinguished by rain.

In scratchy, dry strokes of rapidly applied ink, Obata captured the anxious mood of a city filled with billowing smoke and figures carrying their belongings through the streets.

A few days after the fires were extinguished, Obata started a series of small watercolors, each 5 or 6 inches high by 7 ½ inches wide.  

He later said about this time, “I wanted to describe, as a third person, how the earthquake affected people.”

This picture focuses on the Japanese consulate, where Obata’s countrymen are waiting for help or news. Warm yellow light spills from the buildings’ windows, a beacon of comfort for the anxious people gathered outside.

By contrast, San Francisco’s City Hall lay in ruins. Only recently completed, shoddy construction contributed to the devastation seen here. 

Obata’s view shows the building’s skeletal remains from the rear.

Nearby, a few people huddle by a rough-hewn shelter, shaded by a stand of trees that somehow survived the fires.

An untitled scene of a woman walking down a wide avenue evokes the surreal mood of the city in the days after the fire:

the gutted facade of a building highlighted against a blue sky, 

a woman’s cheerful cerise cape,

and a cart piled high with someone’s belongings, moving down the street behind her.

Other paintings from the series allude to the quake’s toll on the artist.

To the left of the scene lie the ruins of one of the grand homes that lined the east side of Van Ness Avenue before the quake.   

The area beyond the building’s facade is the west-facing slope of Nob Hill, where Obata was living at the time of the earthquake. The entire hillside, once a bustling neighborhood, was destroyed. 

The chimney in Obata’s room collapsed, then later the entire building was engulfed in fire. He fled across Van Ness to a refugee camp in nearby Lafayette Park.

Our Camp shows the temporary home where he spent the next few months. He later recalled, “my friends were suffering from the shortage of food and clothing. Because I had . . . plenty [donated by a friendly cook], people began to come stay at my place, and we had fun.”

The camp is pictured as a basic but orderly and even convivial space, with bedding airing outside a tent, and pots hanging nearby.

Six people are gathered under the shade of a tree. Splashes of red and pink bring warmth to the scene. 

A line of bright blue laundry suggests their efforts to maintain the routines of daily life.

A month after the quake, Obata positioned himself on another downtown street corner to record this view of Japantown (Nihonmachi) after the fires. Of the two neighborhoods in which Japanese immigrants lived and worked, this was an older district at the edge of Chinatown.

Obata’s vantage point at the corner of California and Grant Street shows the dome of the Call Building on Market Street a few blocks away. The rubble is a poignant reminder of the many Japanese businesses lost and friends injured, made homeless, or deceased.

Most of San Francisco’s Chinatown also burned to the ground within days of the quake. Thousands of now-homeless Chinese residents were sent across the bay to Oakland. There they were assigned to a racially segregated section of the refugee camp at Lake Merritt.

The Chinese Camp was on the marshy estuary along the lake’s south side. This rare, surviving picture shows a crowd dressed in colorful, loose-sleeved jackets beside a row of tents. Above them, Obata included one of the trees that gave the Willows Camp its name.  

On the back of the sketch Obata noted, “Ambassador Liang Cheng visited San Francisco, by decree of the Emperor after the earthquake.” The San Francisco Call newspaper reported on the Chinese ambassador’s visit on May 23, 1906.

Two hundred more refugees from Chinatown were sent to Camp 3 in the Presidio. The camp was set in an isolated, windy area above the Pacific on the west side of the military reservation. This sketch may show a spot near Marshall Beach, located close to Camp 3.

The back of the sketch is inscribed, “In the Presidio barracks, along the shore, there is a greenwood with leafy shade. There people gather to relieve their thirst and exhaustion."

Three men face away, their shoulders hunched with fatigue as they quench their thirst from the jugs to their right.

The lush setting around them is striking. It is a reminder that Obata spent the first two years after his arrival sketching the landscapes of Northern California.  None of those early sketches survived the fire.

He later said about the earthquake, “I . . . knew by then that you have to face anything nature gives with your whole body and spirit.”

His awe in the face of nature’s power was expressed in many later paintings, including his series depicting the scenery of Yosemite National Park.