March 21, 2011
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The following is a translation of the Henshu Techo column from The Yomiuri Shimbun's March 21 issue.
* * *
"I clearly saw the huge, white walls of foaming waves that stretched boundlessly on the horizon gliding up across the sea."
So went the novel "Tsunami," authored by Tetsuo Takashima, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. The novel vividly depicts the moment when a massive tsunami triggered by a fictitious great earthquake in the Tokai region assaults the Japanese archipelago.
Disasters wrought by the tsunami that followed the massive earthquake that pummeled the Tohoku and Kanto regions on March 11--including the radioactive leakage at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant--turned out to be far more devastating than anything the author could have imagined.
Huge tsunami always occur when least expected.
During the Edo period (1603-1867), tsunami caused major disasters in various parts of the country, such as the castle town of Osaka and the Kii Peninsula, Shikoku and Okinawa regions. Since the Meiji era (1868-1912), tales of two massive tsunami that hit the Sanriku Coast, in 1896 and 1933, have been handed down from generation to generation.
To pass along the experience of massive tsunami to younger generations, a story based on the Nankai Earthquake and ensuing tsunami in the closing days of the Edo period was utilized as teaching material for many years in a central government-approved primary school textbook.
However, in recent years, fading memories of tsunami disasters have weakened people's sense of crisis.
Local people also might have been overconfident about the huge seawalls that had been built based on lessons learned from tsunami along the Sanriku Coast. But the March 11 tsunami easily swept past these seawalls. Our difficult, perennial battle against nature is certain to continue.
(Mar. 24, 2011)
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The following is a translation of the Henshu Techo column from The Yomiuri Shimbun's March 21 issue.
* * *
"I clearly saw the huge, white walls of foaming waves that stretched boundlessly on the horizon gliding up across the sea."
So went the novel "Tsunami," authored by Tetsuo Takashima, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. The novel vividly depicts the moment when a massive tsunami triggered by a fictitious great earthquake in the Tokai region assaults the Japanese archipelago.
Disasters wrought by the tsunami that followed the massive earthquake that pummeled the Tohoku and Kanto regions on March 11--including the radioactive leakage at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant--turned out to be far more devastating than anything the author could have imagined.
Huge tsunami always occur when least expected.
During the Edo period (1603-1867), tsunami caused major disasters in various parts of the country, such as the castle town of Osaka and the Kii Peninsula, Shikoku and Okinawa regions. Since the Meiji era (1868-1912), tales of two massive tsunami that hit the Sanriku Coast, in 1896 and 1933, have been handed down from generation to generation.
To pass along the experience of massive tsunami to younger generations, a story based on the Nankai Earthquake and ensuing tsunami in the closing days of the Edo period was utilized as teaching material for many years in a central government-approved primary school textbook.
However, in recent years, fading memories of tsunami disasters have weakened people's sense of crisis.
Local people also might have been overconfident about the huge seawalls that had been built based on lessons learned from tsunami along the Sanriku Coast. But the March 11 tsunami easily swept past these seawalls. Our difficult, perennial battle against nature is certain to continue.
(Mar. 24, 2011)
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