JAJ33: Magnitude 9.0, 10 years on

Hey everyone, it’s podcasting time. This is Just Another Jerk, Dispatches from Japan. I am, of course, Jonathan Isaacson. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts - Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora for listeners in the US, Stitcher. Maybe somewhere else. While you’re there, remember to rate the show and if you’ve got a little extra time give it a review. And, yeah, this is a bit of a subdued intro because today marks 10 years since northeastern Japan was rocked by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that caused a major tsunami and the Fukushima number 1 nuclear disaster.

And I’ve got some thoughts about all this, though they aren’t very focused. But, I thought I’d share. I did an episode last year as well, on the 9th anniversary of the disaster, so you can go check that out if you want more thoughts. You have to go all the way back to episode 4 for that one. I imagine I’ll repeat myself a bit, but hopefully not too much.

So, yeah, 10 years. 10 years after one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded. Followed by a tsunami the likes of which very few people can remember because they only happen rarely. 10 years - sure it seems like a lot of time. But it really isn’t that much time. There are still a lot of places along the coast that haven’t come back from the tsunami. Probably never will. At least, not any time while people who experienced the disaster are still alive.

There are a couple of parks that my family and I go to - good playground equipment that my daughter really likes. At least three of the parks we go to regularly are in areas that were inundated. There are markers that show how high the water was. And in all these places along the coast have emergency hills. Places that everyone can get up to higher ground in case another major tsunami hits. Which is really important because in the coastal areas of Sendai, people had only about 10 minutes from the quake until the tsunami hit. The areas around these parks are all still completely empty. Most of the trees and all of the neighborhoods that lined the Teizan canal - a canal that runs along the coast in southern Miyagi prefecture - were completely wiped away. Almost none of the houses and only a handful of trees remained standing in any form. So, yeah, the land still very clearly bears the scars of the disaster.

It’s worse, from what I hear, down in Fukushima, because they also have to deal with the nuclear power plant. The damage done down there is huge - more in terms of reputation than anything. I mean, yes, it was a nuclear power plant having a meltdown. But the actual, observable health toll from the meltdown is a lot smaller than you probably think. The same is actually true for Chernobyl. I’m not going to get into that discussion - obviously, nuclear plants having meltdowns is not a good thing. But - I’ll just say that the damage done by the power plant’s meltdown is less than I had thought it would be. And I’ll leave that topic at that. But, the blow to the reputation of the area has been a big problem for Fukushima. Kids who relocated from the exclusion zones - or anywhere in Fukushima - got bullied. Farmers and fishers can’t sell their wares because the name “Fukushima” is tainted, even if the crops or the fish they are selling is well within safety guidelines for radiation set out by the government. And in general, probably largely due to the small number of people who have returned - some towns have only 10% of their pre-disaster populations - so probably at least partially due to the decreased populations and lack of people coming back, redevelopment of a lot of places in coastal Fukushima has reported been very slow.

So, yeah, 10 years.

So, about a month ago, we had another fairly major earthquake here in the Sendai area. It was, according to seismologists, an aftershock of the big one 10 years ago. From what I gather, to qualify to be an aftershock, the frequency of quakes of a certain magnitude in the general area of a large quake - so if the frequency of say a M7+ is higher after the main quake than M7+ quakes before the main quake - that’s an aftershock, though the seismologist explaining this said it’s just semantics, really. An aftershock or a foreshock is still the exact same thing as an earthquake. So, yeah, we had a M7.3 about a month ago around 11pm on a Saturday night. It registered a strong 5 on the Shindo scale - which measures surface movement, so one quake will have multiple measurements, generally getting weaker the further you move from the epicenter.

Oh, and just a quick note about magnitude - earthquakes are NOT measured in the Richter Scale anymore. When people in the US think about earthquakes, they think about the magnitude. A lot of people still think it’s the Richter scale being used, but that’s not correct. The magnitude - that number that’s attached to earthquakes - 7.3 this past weekend and 9.0 in the big one 10 years ago - is NOT using the Richter scale. The modern measurement is, in fact, the moment magnitude. It’s similar to the older Richter Scale, but more accurate. Think of it a little like Newton and Einstein. Newtonian Physics works in a lot of contexts, but Einsteinian physics is more accurate. I realize that probably didn’t help a lot of people, but, yeah. Moment magnitude. Look it up if you want more detailed information. Simply put, though, the magnitude measures the energy at the epicenter. It doesn’t say anything about the intensity of surface movement. That’s where the Shindo scale comes in. There are other similar scales like the Mercalli intensity scale that are used around the world. Here in Japan, we use the Shindo scale. It goes from 1 to 7, with a couple of subdivisions - weak and strong 5s and 6s. To put it simply, the bigger the number, the more the shaking. The big one 10 years ago hit 7 in a few places. If it’s 7, you can’t stand up. You get knocked down and tossed around. Even in the 6 range, standing up is nearly impossible. Saturday’s quake registered a strong 6 in a couple of places. Not where we live. That was probably around a strong 5. Not impossible to stand and move, but certainly not an easy task, either.The moment magnitude scale is based on the Richter Scale, but it is an improved version essentially. End sidenote.

So, we had our M7.3, Shindo 5 quake and it was the strongest shaking I have ever personally experienced. And we live on the 4th floor, so shaking and swaying is amplified. And it was a long quake. Half a minute? 45 seconds? Not sure, but it was quite a while. My daughter slept right through the whole thing. Which is fine. It turned out we weren’t in any danger. In the end, our place - nothing broken at all. One or two books and a deck of playing cards fell on the floor. Some spice bottles tumbled off their rack. No dishes broken or anything! My office at work? A couple books on the floor. Clean up took about 2 minutes.

On Sunday, the day after, I went out with my family to pick up a portable gas burner - just in case we lose use of the gas range. We went to a big box hardware store - and there was a little bit of damage. To the drywall. And one of the exposed aluminum beams used to hang the drywall was twisted. But otherwise things looked fine.

And that brings me to what I guess I want to talk about. When it comes to earthquake safety, Japan is a good place to be. I mean, yeah, given the frequency of major earthquakes, that’s a good thing. Because here, a magnitude 7 earthquake just isn’t a weird thing. So magnitude 7 and higher - there has been an average of about 1 a year since I’ve been in japan - Getting close to 17 years now. Go down to 6? There have been at least 27 since I’ve been in Japan.

That magnitude 7.3 quake a month ago. Maximum Shindo Strong 6. Deaths? Zero. Injuries? About 150. Collapsed buildings? None that I’ve heard about yet. Sure, some buildings have been damaged. Some of the pillars holding the Shinkansen wires were damaged, and it took better than a week to fix them all. But the manmade structures held up really well. As they seem to always do. The apartment my family lives in has been around since well before the big 2011 earthquake. And it seems just fine. But for the vast majority of people, even some in the towns that were hit by the strongest shaking, life was pretty much back to normal as soon as Sunday. And definitely by Monday.

Now, some of it comes down to luck. If that’s the right word. This most recent quake hit at 11pm on Saturday. During the coronavirus. So not as many people were probably out and about as would have been otherwise. And the quakes up here have been off the coast, so the worst shaking isn’t happening on land. What about tsunamis? Well, apparently the earthquake this time was deep enough that it didn’t trigger more than a 20cm wave. So, yeah, I guess there is at least some element of luck. And in that vein, had the massive 2011 earthquake hit in the middle of the night - it was in the middle of the afternoon at 2:46pm - but if it had been in the middle of the night, the tsunami might have taken even a greater toll. People groggy and confused in the pitch dark - power was knocked out in that quake. I can see that being potentially a lot worse than it already was in the middle of the afternoon. Oh, yeah. This most recent quake didn’t knock our power out at all. I know some places lost power or water. There was a hotel in Fukushima prefecture with a waterfall coming down the main staircase. But, by and large, the power grid was fine in this one.

I guess all of this is to say to everyone who I saw on facebook worried, commenting that a 7+ earthquake was a big one and thanking whatever deity that everyone was OK - Japan is well equipped - even more so now than in 1995 which is when the Hanshin earthquake rocked Kobe and the Osaka region. That was also a 7.3, by the way. But that one hit more or less under land - not out in the ocean. And it was in a densely populated area. So that explains a lot.

What was I saying? Oh yeah - in a lot of cases, due to Japan’s earthquake preparedness and building codes, if there isn’t a tsunami, Japan is a pretty good place to ride out an earthquake. Japan is a relatively wealthy country with a history of earthquakes. It has the money to take measures to deal with the quakes.

After last month’s M7.3 shake, my mother and I were talking about it, and she asked me if there’s a sound that earthquakes make. Which might seem like an odd question, or maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know. I spent a lot of my youth in Illinois, where tornadoes are a common occurrence. There was a weather documentary produced by WGN, one of the Chicago TV stations, and it was called, “It Sounded like a freight train.” So, asking what an earthquake sounds like makes sense to me.

And I don’t know what it would sound like if you are outside, away from buildings and other things that could rattle around to make noise. Does the earth itself make a sound when it is shaking? I imagine that in an extremely violent quake, yes, it has to make some noise. If you are in a building, there is definitely a sound to an earthquake. It is the sound of everything around you shaking and clattering.

If you want an example, you can find a video on YouTube taken inside the Sendai Airport during the big quake. I’ll put a link in the description of the episode. No one is injured in the video, so it’s not upsetting in that way, but it is a pretty upsetting video if you’ve lived through a major earthquake. And the sound is something that is hard to forget. It’s the sound of the building and everything in it just being tossed about by the earth. And it just doesn’t stop. It goes on for more than 2 minutes. The video starts in the midst of the quake - presumably the person recording thought it was starting to feel long so let’s record it - which means the quake was probably close to 3 minutes long. Which is an eternity. Amazingly - none of the widows you can see in the video break. Everyone evacuates the airport and then is promptly told to go back inside and up to the third floor. The airport is only a few hundred meters from the coast. So it got swamped by the tsunami. I don’t believe anyone died at the airport, because it seems to be well built and was a good place to shelter from the disaster.

Which brings me to one of the last points I guess I’ll talk about. And that is just how powerful the videos are. I remember watching them in real time - I was living in the Sapporo area where we had fairly strong shaking - enough that we had to evacuate the school office three times that day - but we never lost power or anything. Teachers were tuning in on their computers and there was one TV in the teacher’s room, if I remember correctly. So we started getting live images from around Miyagi and Iwate, where the tsunami was the worst. And I was shook. I still am. There’s a video from Ofunato, a town in Iwate. The person filming initially is the boss at some small-ish company, it seems, and he tells everyone, as the shaking is still happening, “A tsunami is coming. Get out. Evacuate.” And everyone heads up to higher ground. The video cuts - maybe to another cameraman, maybe the same guy - and you can just hear the terror in everyone’s voice as they watch the tsunami ripping through the town. The cameraman starts begging for it to stop. And, of course, it doesn’t. In some places, it’s estimated that the tsunami reached a height of 40 meters. That’s like a 13 story building. And that is mind boggling. A lot of it comes down to the shape of the coast in northern Miyagi and Iwate. It’s basically fjords. So the water got funneled into the narrow inlets and rose very high. In the flat coastal areas around Sendai, water made it as far as 10km inland. A lot of the roads down to the coast have signs letting you know where the water reached.

But, yeah, the videos still have a lot of power. There’s one more I’ll mention. And I’ll link to all these in the description. There’s a short video from someone - sounds like an older guy, in part due to his thick accent - from just up the hill from Okawa Elementary school. That’s a school where 74 out of 108 kids and 10 out of 13 teachers died in the tsunami. In this video, the guy is filming from up the hill a bit from the big bridge that crosses the river near where the school was. He’s talking to someone he’s with, saying things like, “I wonder if the school’s OK.” And knowing what we do now...well. Yeah. It’s a video that’s pretty tough. I mentioned it last year, but the book is powerful, so it’s worth mentioning again - Ghosts of the Tsunami, by Richard Lloyd Perry. It’s a really well written, heart breaking book about what went wrong at Okawa Elementary school. TL;DR - the school didn’t have a full evacuation plan in case of a tsunami. And having been to the site of the school, I understand why. You can’t even see the ocean. It’s still a couple of KM away. Yes, you do have a big, wide river right by the school, where the water can rush right up, which is what it did. So, yeah, what happened was inexcusable, but it makes some amount of sense why the tsunami plan was just “Evacuate to a safe location” essentially.

So, yeah. 10 years. Obviously, in a lot of places, a lot of healing still needs to happen. And I am kind of fascinated by the importance of 10. Humans obviously like nice round numbers. Not sure if we’re hardwired that way, or if it’s imprinted on us culturally. Should this year’s remembrance be any different than last year’s or next year’s? Probably not. But it will be. Would it be different if humans normally had 12 fingers? I’d guess that it would. But that’s a weird tangent, so we won’t end it there.

Let’s end on a positive note. So, while a lot of places certainly still need some healing to happen, a lot of other places are well on that path. Little things like the parks I mentioned. Just last weekend, I went to one of the parks with my family. My daughter loved it. She loves all the parks that are along the coast - they are pretty nice. And all fairly new, obviously. And the parks are always full of families with kids who didn’t have to live through that day. And new businesses and whatnot keep opening. Last year, a nice new cycling park/hotel/onsen place opened in Natori, the town just south of Sendai on the coast. The hotel is right on the coast, so you’ve got a nice view of the sea. There’s a nice long bike path along the coast you can use. A nice playground for families - and the hotel serves as a tsunami emergency high ground. It’s a really nice addition to the coast.

And just across the river from the bike place, in Sendai, they’re building a new onsen and market thing that is set to open next year. The train line up the coast is mostly reconnected. The towns that have made progress on rebuilding have taken the opportunity to build new markets and eateries to attract visitors. My family has a list of places we want to check out eventually - after the Coronavirus calms down, and the kid gets a little older. So, yes, there are positives 10 years after magnitude 9.0

And that’s where I’ll end it today.

Please remember to subscribe, rate and review the podcast wherever it is you cast your pods. This podcast is on most of the major platforms - Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora - probably some others. If it’s not on your favorite platform, let me know and I’ll look into getting it on that platform as well. You can find the twitter for this podcast @justanothercast. You can email the show at justanotherjerkpodcast@gmail.com. That’s all for me. I’m Jonathan Isaacson, and I’m out. Peace.