Nearly 13 years have passed since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that resulted in the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Yet the memory in Japan is still fresh. And, on Monday, all those memories resurfaced again as Ishikawa began to shake and tsunami warnings began to sound.
Such warnings are not unusual in Japan. When I first moved here, I would jump out of bed at the slightest tremor our building registered.
But, within a few months, I was still sleeping when this happened. In Japan, earthquakes quickly become part of your life. You get used to it, to a certain point….
You always have an unsettling feeling in the back of your mind: When will the next big earthquake happen? Is our building safe?
For this generation, those fears materialized on March 11, 2011.
For two minutes, the earth shook in a way no one had ever experienced in their lives. And it was still shaking.
Anyone who has been through this remembers exactly where they were and how terrified they felt. But the worst was about to happen.
Within 40 minutes, the first tsunamis hit the coast, crashing into seawalls and wiping out towns and villages for hundreds of miles along Japan’s northeast coast, all broadcast on live television from a news helicopter flying over the city of Sendai.
The next day brought even more terrible news. A nuclear plant was in crisis. The Fukushima plant had suffered serious breakdowns. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes. Even Tokyo did not feel safe.
Trauma
What happened that day left a deep collective trauma. In the months that followed, I was looking for a new place to live in Tokyo. My wife studied geological maps to see where the strongest bedrock was, on high ground and away from rivers.
She was obsessed with how old the buildings were. She was very clear: “We’re looking for something that was built after 1981.”
Once we moved into our 1985 building, we started stockpiling food and water. Huddled under the bathroom sink were boxes of packaged food with a five-year expiration date.
The dread and horror of 2011 returned on Monday. The death toll is approaching 50 and is likely to rise further. Roads have been broken and bridges have been destroyed.
Hundreds of buildings collapsed, trapping people in their rubble. The earthquake also triggered massive landslides.
But the vast majority of buildings are still standing. In the big cities of Toyama and Kanazawa, life this morning seemed to be returning to some sort of normalcy.
I spoke to a friend in the nearby city of Kashiwazaki. “It was really scary,” he told me. “By far the biggest I’ve ever experienced here. And we had to evacuate away from the coast. But now we’re back home.”
Learning
Despite the extensive damage, Monday’s quake is also a remarkable story of Japan’s success in mitigating such disasters.
Japan does not report earthquakes by commenting on their magnitude, but rather by saying how much the ground is shaking. The scale ranges from 1 to 7. And on Monday in Ishikawa the shaking reached the maximum: 7.
The triumph of the country’s engineering is clear when comparing the aftermath of Monday’s disaster with the massive earthquake that struck Tokyo in 1923.
The Great Kanto Earthquake, as it is known, leveled large swaths of the city. Modern brick buildings, built on the European model, crumbled.
The aftermath led to the development of Japan’s first earthquake-resistant building code. From then on, new buildings would have to be reinforced with steel and concrete. Wooden buildings would have thicker beams.
Each time the country has been hit by a major earthquake, the damage has been studied and regulations have been updated. The biggest jump came in 1981, after which all new buildings required seismic isolation measures.
Again, after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, more lessons were learned.
One measure of that success is that when the massive 9.0 earthquake struck in 2011, the shaking level in Tokyo reached 5. That’s the same as the tremor that struck Japan’s capital in 1923.
In 1923, the city was flattened: 140,000 people died. In 2011, huge skyscrapers swayed, windows shattered, but no major building collapsed. It was the tsunami that killed so many thousands of people, not the earth tremors.
It is hard to think of any other country on Earth that could have experienced Monday’s earthquake without suffering a far worse impact.