Earthquake Update

We have been touched by hearing from many friends asking if we are OK following the earthquake.  We are fine and, as noted in an earlier post, the recent large earthquakes, including foreshocks and aftershocks, took place on the island of Kyūshū (九州), 700 miles from Tokyo.

Japan is composed of four main islands.  Kyuushu, where Kumamoto is located, is the westernmost.  Tokyo is on the main island of Honshū (本州).)  We haven’t felt any of the tremors.  Here is a diagram from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) which shows where the shaking was felt and the intensity using the JMA scale.

Japan measures quakes not by magnitude but by intensity of shaking.  So while the Richter scale measurement of the Saturday quake has settled in at 7.0, comparable to the 1989 San Francisco quake and somewhat more than the 1994 Northridge earthquake closer to home, Japan uses a scale from 0 to 7, where 6.5 to 7 means that most homes collapse or are severely damaged.  On this scale, the recent quake was measured at 6+ at its epicenter.  Here is a full explanation of the JMA scale.  (I am still trying to puzzle out why it is a meteorological agency that is responsible for this.)

The earthquake has, of course, occupied the news here and we have been following it on NHK in English – our Japanese has not progressed to the point of understanding the rapid fire speech employed by news broadcasters.  The news is, sadly, about death and destruction, but public order in Japan is very strong and there have been no reports of looting, as has occurred in Ecuador.  The building codes here, especially in the urban areas, are very strict.  Some of the problems in Kumamoto were caused by the fact that it is a more rural and less modern area with many wooden houses that have not had been built or upgraded to the most recent standards.

Today will be our first day in school following the second, more damaging quake, which occurred early on Saturday morning, Japan time.  We’ll see whether the teachers deflect from their very structured lesson plans to talk about it.  In preparation, we are boning up on Japanese earthquake vocabulary.  The only two we know now are the words for earthquake, 地震 (jishin, ji meaning ground and shin meaning shaking）and volcano, 火山 (kazan, meaning fire mountain).  We’ll be prepared – and although we are in the land of intensive earthquakes, we are also in the land of intensive preparation.  Our Japanese adventure continues.