Living in an earthquake-prone country

We interrupt your regularly scheduled column to bring you a very special episode of “Life in Japan.” This has less to do with anything relating directly to me in the past week, and is more to reassure everyone back home that, despite what they may have heard, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. But I’m getting ahead of myself… so let’s start from the beginning.

From what I understand, there was an earthquake here in Japan this past Saturday. In fact, it was a relatively strong one, with a magnitude of 6.8 or 7.2, depending on the source. I know this, because relatives and friends immediately started contacting me that evening (just as they were all waking up back in the other hemisphere) to make sure I was OK. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have found out until the next day.

I apologize if I sound somewhat unimpressed by all the fuss, but the thing is, earthquakes aren’t exactly all that rare an occurrence here in Japan. While really strong earthquakes do come along every few years, and have the potential to do a lot of damage if they strike in the right place (such as the Kobe earthquake in 1995), it’s really just par for the course here. Japan, you see, is located along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a region characterized by frequent seismic (and volcanic) activity. As a result of multiple oceanic and continental plates scraping against each other in the ultimate low-speed collision (a few centimeters a year, give or take), Japan experiences up to 1500 low-intensity earthquakes per year, with really major ones coming up a few times each century. (The biggest ones by far in the past 100 years were the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 which devastated Tokyo, and the aforementioned Kobe Earthquake in 1995.)

Japan also has a number of (mostly dormant) volcanoes, which have substantial eruptions every millennium or so. All this might still make some people uneasy; I admit it does look kind of scary on paper. But of those 1000-odd quakes that Japan experiences each year, I have only felt a grand total of one. It was in October of last year, and took the form a low frequency rumble with a little vibration, which lasted all of about 30 seconds. Not quite the grand cataclysm I was expecting it to be, and frankly, I was slightly disappointed (not that that’s what my parents would want to hear). It was really quite anticlimactic.

I suppose that I really shouldn’t blame people back home for worrying about me. After all, the geography of foreign countries is not something given much focus (or at least paid much attention) in US schools…but then again, certain members of my family are liable to call us up in Clayton on a fairly regular basis to ask how we’re coping with the latest winter storm in Buffalo, so maybe it’s not the schools’ fault. Regardless, to give you a sense of the distance between me and Saturday’s earthquake, the epicenter was in Iwate Prefecture, which is about 240 miles north of Tokyo. I live in Osaka, which is about 250 miles west of Tokyo. I’m not quite sure if the Pythagorean Theorem is valid for figuring distances like this, but by my reckoning, that puts me somewhere between 350 and 400 miles away. In US terms, that’s roughly the same distance as it is between Clayton and Washington, D.C. So, I’m in no way particularly affected by the quake.

I think, though, that geographical concerns aside, the news media in the US has also helped paint the picture in a somewhat more disastrous light than absolutely necessary. I could spill much ink ranting about the various preoccupations of news outlets in the US (most of which seem to involve famous people doing very foolish things), but the exploitation of disaster seems to be up there in the top ten. And with the recent earthquakes in China that killed over 50,000 people and left millions of others homeless receding from its remarkably-short attention span, I can only assume that they were trying to draw as many parallels as possible in order to keep milking the situation. This is the only way I can explain headlines such as “Japan rescuers search for quake missing”, or “Japan earthquake death toll rises”. Neither of these is untrue, of course, but it’s somewhat less compelling when you read on and realize that the number of missing is one dozen, and the confirmed death toll is a whole ten people – including a man who died after fleeing in terror from his house and being hit by a passing truck. While I realize that it is no less a tragedy for these things, and it has gotten significant coverage within Japan as well, the effort – at least initially – to compare it to last month’s earthquake in Sichuan is completely laughable.

This is not to say, however, that I am completely at ease with being in a nation known for occasionally having its largest cities (which are among the largest cities on Earth) completely leveled. The statistical chances of me being in the wrong place at the wrong time during a seismic event are extremely low, but they are still higher than they would be back home. And while Japan has extensive building codes, which require structures to be able to withstand fairly strong earthquakes, I’m not too keen on being in one that isn’t up to snuff if a Big One comes. The people around me seem to take this relatively in stride, worrying more about ever-increasing gas prices, declining job benefits, and the periodic saber-rattling from North Korea. Guess that means I just need to adapt.

Of course, come to think of it, all this tectonic monkey business also has its perks: after all, it means that the country has tons of hot springs, which I am immensely fond of (and will probably devote a column to at some point). So, you know what? All things considered, living in an earthquake-prone country isn’t half bad.