The Atlantic has posted an online image gallery which uses some images from The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923: Materials from the Dana and Vera Reynolds Collection. In August 1923, William Dana Reynolds, with his wife Vera Hunt Reynolds and their young daughter Helen, embarked from Honolulu on the Japanese steamship Taiyo Maru, bound for Yokohama. While at sea, the ship experienced and survived a tsunami only to arrive, badly damaged, in Yokohama Bay on September 8th as witness to the destruction caused by the Great Kanto Earthquake. Eight of the male passengers decided to leave the ship and enter the city. Dana Reynolds was among them. For the next few hours, and later, upon his return several days after the initial quake, he recorded a series of compelling images of the horror and devastation, including some of the earliest photographs of the destruction taken by Americans, and over 100 original photographs taken in Yokohama, Kyoto, Shanghai, and Hawaii, as well as many photographs purchased in Japan that documented the devastation.
The collection also includes newspaper clippings (describing what the Reynolds witnessed in great detail, being transcribed from letters written home from Mrs. Reynolds herself), travel ephemera, photographic portraits of the Reynolds family, biographies, essays, and a brief history of the disaster.