7.9 and 8.8 Earthquakes in Japan

Ugh

lengthy shaking through the morning in tokyo.

i was woken up yesterday morning by an earthquake off ibaraki and exactly one hour earlier this morning, max intensity 3 in tokyo, according to my phone. i always thought especially before moving to the city that the tohoku region was, like, far away from tokyo but it's like, the southeastern boundaries of tohoku, the fukushima coast, it's like a two and a half hour drive, the distance from seattle to vancouver and the northernmost commuter suburbs of tokyo are right up there. i'm moving at the end of the month to a sturdier highrise on higher land which was a selling point in the real estate company's pitch but right now i live in a pre-1982 building that seems to amplify the shakes of even modest quakes and i can feel the rumble of the nearby arakawa streetcar line and the neighborhood is 2.5 meters above sea level. but i mean apart from the potential that this building could collapse and the roof could slip in onto my soft body right before i fall three stories into a twisted pile of rebar and concrete or that fire could sweep through the closely packed streets of arakawa ward or the low lying lands could be inundated, it's interesting to feel the rhythmic judder of the earth, a strong shake and then a pulsing slow shake, slow sometimes like this morning when the house seemed to stay slowly shaking for at least thirty seconds after the first rough wave or yesterday morning when it was like a shockwave hitting, a sudden shake and pause pause another weaker shake.

It's nice to realize you'll live to see another day, isn't it.

Was watching the 'live' news feed video, on that link above, for an hour before I realised it was a recording.

Reiyūkai Shakaden Temple, Tokyo — Takenaka Corp., 1975

The spaceship-like steel and black granite structure, inspired by the mysterious architecture of Seiichi Shirai, houses a reservoir with 400 tonnes of drinking water, in the event that Tokyo is struck by a major disaster. pic.twitter.com/BzExkM0sbX

— Irène DB (@UrbanFoxxxx) July 11, 2019

love this steel and granite water tank that looks like a predator space ship or base or something.

i've been in there before, and i know it's supposed to be open to everyone (run by some new religious buddhist sect i assume is supported by all the aging former 60s radicals millionaires that live around there and which i learn from wikipedia also counts former tokyo governor and xenophobic blowhard ishihara as a devotee) but unwelcoming, a long climb up massive stairs, then it's too dark to see anything inside. the intersection there (if you turned left from the shakaden entrance, or walked up from kamiyacho) is interesting, the tokyo tower looming overhead, and whether or not seiichi shirai inspired the shakaden, there is an actual seiichi shirai building right there: the NOA building.

no picture seems to capture the rough beauty/strangeness of it:

https://shoto-museum.jp/wp-content/themes/shoto_museum/images/architecture_photo09.jpg

Interesting. I’m staying right by there for a couple of months later this year.

10 years ago today (officially 9.1 on the Richter scale, lasting 6 minutes).

14,308 people drowned (including 1 man in Indonesia and 1 man in Oregon!)
19,575 total dead including after-effects

The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami waves that reached heights of up to 125 ft in Miyako in Tōhoku's Iwate Prefecture, causing whitewater to surge up to 6 miles inland. Residents of Sendai had only eight to ten minutes of warning, and more than a hundred evacuation sites were washed away.

The tsunami broke icebergs off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf in Antarctica, ~8k miles away.

The earth's axis shifted between 10-25cm.

Three level 7 meltdowns occured at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex.

Within a year objects such as a soccer ball and a motorcycle would wash ashore in western Canada, over four thousand miles after drifting across the Pacific.