This Day in Japanese History (Tsunami Leaves More Than 20K Dead)

June 16, 1896—Less than 40 minutes after experiencing slow shaking from an earthquake, the Japanese port of Sanriku was hit with a tsunami that destroyed 170 miles of coastline and 9,000 homes, claimed the lives of up to 28,000 people, and injured still thousands more.

In the long history of mankind, a kind of numbness, as much by sheer repetition as by mass suffering, can ensue when reading about the impact of natural disasters. For anyone hoping to understand other nations, this is unfortunate not just because, as John Donne writes, “Every man’s death diminishes me,” but because the impact of natural events is magnified countless times in the human environment.

In a way, it was almost inevitable that I would write about this particular destructive event, especially after the tsunami that occurred this March in Japan. How did the earlier disaster match up against that one, along with the even more ghastly 2004 Indian Ocean catastrophe?

For the Meiji-Sanriku disaster, its initial 7.6-magnitude earthquake didn’t match the one that occurred three months ago (8.9-9.0 magnitude), nor the one that devastated 11 coast countries along the Indian Ocean seven years ago (its undersea earthquake was magnitude 9.1-9.3). But it was bad enough to rank on a list of the world’s 10 worst tsunamis compiled by the Oregon Emergency Management Preparedness and Disaster Blog.

Here are other ways to imagine the distress created by the 1896 disaster:

· The wave unleashed after the mass mocement along the underwater fault reached a height of 25 meters (80 ft.) high;
· The crisis first broke slowly, then swiftly, carrying virtually everything before it; and
· The impact could be felt as far away as San Francisco, where a 9.5-ft. wave was observed.

At first, fishermen from Honshu, off the coast of Sanriku, were unaware of the event. More than 20 miles out to sea, they had no reason to suspect the worst, because the waves beneath their boats--only about 15 inches--were nothing like the waves bearing down on the coast.

You can imagine their horror, then, when, approaching land, they beheld more debris than they could imagine--and corpses floating in the sea.

The tsunami ravaged Japan’s maritime culture. The nation’s numerous mountain areas have long compelled residents to seek shelter and jobs along the coast, frequently as fishermen and in aqua cultural industries and canneries. That meant that they suffered disproportionately because of the tsunami.

In an article written before the last disaster, reporter Winston Ross noted that, because of the frequency of tsunamis in Japan over the years, the nation has become "the best-prepared country for tsunamis and earthquakes in the world, with a vigilance that combines the reflections of the past with the technology of today - at a cost of billions of dollars.”

Even getting its early-warning system down to three minutes, however, Japan still survives horribly from these events. In a way, the scale of the damage has become even more frightening, because of the interconnectedness involved in a highly industrialized society (the people of 1896 did not have to worry about a nuclear event.