After morning on Tuesday, the sights that met residents and rescue personnel in central Japan had an air of unfamiliarity. Families lounging in front of the TV on New Year's Day must have felt as though a lifetime had passed since a 7.6 magnitude earthquake rattled the area with severe shaking that lasted for more than a minute the previous day.
Variety programs heralded in the Year of the Dragon on their screens, but in an instant, TV commentators in hard hats took over, their voices urgent with pleas for people to seek higher ground as far inland as possible. Japan was preparing for the possibility of a potentially catastrophic tsunami for the first time in over a decade.
In the isolated towns and villages of the Noto peninsula, high-rise buildings leaned awkwardly on their sides, roof tiles covered collapsed houses, and cars were parked on roads pocked with deep fissures. The first of the severe earthquakes, which triggered shaking that reached the maximum level of seven on Japan's seismic intensity scale, was the source of the devastation rather than a massive tsunami. Japan has a well-earned reputation for using earthquake-resistant building techniques. The nation is the most seismically active in the world, with over 1,500 detectable earthquakes each year, due to its location in the Pacific "ring of fire."
Tsuyoshi Takada, an emeritus professor at Tokyo University and the head of the Japan Association for Earthquake Engineering, claims that these discrepancies are as much societal as technological. Evacuations from earthquake zones and impending tsunamis can take longer in older towns, frequently with disastrous results. In the 2011 triple disaster, nearly 56% of the victims were 65 years of age or older; many of the deceased and unaccounted for in Noto are local seniors. Since many of these residences were constructed prior to 1981, they do not adhere to strict design requirements. The 1995 Kobe tragedy primarily affected houses constructed prior to that year, which prompted a revision in building laws mandating the seismic retrofitting of specific buildings, including all public schools.
