Sleepless City Consumed by Flames - Kabukicho Building Fire (2001)
In the early morning hours of September 1, 2001, a fire broke out in the Meisei 56 Building, a multi-tenant building in Kabukicho, an entertainment district in Shinjuku, Tokyo, killing 44 people and injuring three, making it the fifth deadliest building fire in postwar Japan.
The building had four stories above ground and two below, with a mahjong game parlor on the third floor, an unlicensed restaurant on the fourth floor, and a high concentration of commercial entertainment and food tenants. Immediately after the fire broke out, emergency exits and evacuation stairs were blocked by luggage, fire doors were inoperable, and the automatic fire alarm system was turned off. Many victims were unable to escape due to the blowing up of smoke and carbon monoxide.
At the time, Kabukicho had been hollowed out after the bursting of the bubble economy and the entertainment district had become overcrowded and complicated, and the increase in unlicensed stores and multi-tenant buildings made the area vulnerable in terms of fire prevention and evacuation. A structural gap had developed between the monitoring network of the government and fire department and the fire management responsibilities of owners and tenants, and this case was a typical example of such a gap.
This tragedy led to the revision of the Fire Service Law in 2002, which strengthened the fire prevention and management system for multi-tenant buildings. The law now mandates the securing of evacuation routes, the installation of evacuation equipment, and periodic inspections and reporting systems, and penalties have also been made much stricter.
This is the moment when the "glamorous night" and "disregard for safety" that Kabukicho had been facing intersected. The 44 lives lost in the time it took them to escape cast a deep shadow over the nightlife district and brought into sharp relief the structural crisis that lies behind the joys of the nightlife.
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