Crisis Points gathers personal accounts of moments of turmoil around the world.

The earthquake hit in the early afternoon off the coast of Honshu, Japan’s most populous island, triggering unprecedented destruction. Ninety percent of the houses in a score of seaside towns collapsed in seconds. Passenger trains fell off railway bridges and plunged into the sea. A few minutes later, a 35-foot-high tsunami rolled in, sweeping away cars, houses and thousands of people, and burying entire towns in mud. Then came fires, fanned by winds and fueled by flimsy wooden houses, reducing much of what remained to ashes.

The date was Sept. 1, 1923, and the event was the Great Kanto Earthquake, the worst calamity in Japan’s history. Largely forgotten, even by most Japanese, the quake leveled the great port city of Yokohama — home to a population of 5,000 expatriates — and burned down more than sixty percent of Tokyo. All told, 145,000 people died, including about 150 Americans, and some 40,000 mostly poor Japanese who were incinerated by a “dragon twist,” a freak tornado of fire that swept over a makeshift camp ground near Tokyo’s Sumida River.

The Friday earthquake was a far more powerful shock — 8.9 on the Richter scale, compared with barely a 7 in 1923 — and it will probably take many weeks, if not months, to assess the full scale of damage. But the pattern was strikingly familiar: devastation stretched along hundreds of miles of seacoast; towns washed away by mudslides; trains carried out to sea; thousands of survivors left stranded on roofs, awaiting rescue. The quake also led to consequences that couldn’t have been imagined in 1923, including the partial meltdown of at least two nuclear reactors. Only the fact that the epicenter was not near a densely populated area prevented far greater casualties.

Can anything be learned from the Great Kanto earthquake and the response to it? One is the importance of speedy, well-coordinated relief to save lives. It’s hard to imagine how difficult the logistical challenges of simply disseminating word about the earthquake were in 1923. Telegraph and telephone lines went down across Japan, and the first full newspaper account didn’t appear until Sept. 4 – a full three days later. A wireless operator in the northern Japanese town of Iwaki functioned as the sole link to the outside world for days, sending fragmentary eyewitness accounts to a relay station in Hawaii – which in turn, passed them on to San Francisco.

Nevertheless, the relief effort, led by the United States, was fast and efficient, and ended up saving thousands from near certain death or prolonged misery. American naval vessels set sail from China on the evening of Sept. 2, and within a week, dozens of warships packed with relief supplies – rice, tents, reed mats, canned roast beef – filled Yokohama harbor.

On the home front, President Calvin Coolidge, not generally regarded as the most forceful of men, took the lead in rallying the United States to the Japanese cause. On Sept. 4 he declared: “An overwhelming disaster has overtaken the people of the friendly nation of Japan. … The cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, and surrounding towns and villages, have been largely if not completely destroyed by earthquake, fire, and flood, with a resultant appalling loss of life and destitution and distress, requiring measures of urgent relief.” The American Red Cross, of which Coolidge was the titular head, kicked off a national relief drive, raising $12 million for earthquake victims and initiating a wave of good feeling between the two countries.

President Obama should draw a lesson from that early example of international relief and provide Japan everything it needs to rebuild devastated areas and aid the injured. The early signs are promising. Mr. Obama evoked Coolidge’s oratory immediately after the quake: “Our hearts go out to our friends in Japan and across the region, and we’re going to stand with them as they recover and rebuild from this tragedy,” he said in a White House news conference. In a strong echo of 1923, the Navy dispatched two aircraft carriers to Japan, and one to the Mariana Islands. Private organizations in Japan and abroad appear to be mobilizing quickly to aid victims.

Yet it should also be remembered that pouring money and supplies into a stricken country or region is no guarantor of stability. The 1923 quake kicked off a national effort to rebuild Tokyo into a world-class city. Yet it also whipped up nationalist hysteria, with vigilante bands roving the lawless countryside, murdering thousands of Koreans. Xenophobic newspapers published accusations that American relief teams were trying to humiliate the Japanese, putting a quick end to the era of good feeling. The army declared martial law and began a steady erosion of democracy, culminating in its expansion into China and the outbreak of World War II. Today Japan is a stable, pro-Western nation. But its economy has been stagnant for years. The earthquake could unify the country with a renewed sense of purpose. Or it could decisively relegate Japan to second-class power status, breeding resentments, perpetuating economic misery, and feeding the aspirations of a still-present nationalist movement.

The 1923 quake should also serve a reminder of the limitations of science. The calamity initiated a massive effort in Japan to predict earthquakes and tsunamis. Scientists at Japanese universities received tens of millions of yen to support projects ranging from constructing logarithmic formulas based on past seismic upheavals, to investigating whether catfish and eels displayed “unusual movements” – such as tail-twitching or whisker-wiggling – in advance of earthquakes. China and the United States lavished funds on similar research. Predicting earthquakes, however, remains a hit-or-miss proposition, often a matter of luck. When the great fault in the Pacific shifted under pressure last week, nobody saw it coming.

Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek correspondent, is the author of “Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II.”