An earthquake has hit Japan—at 8.9 magnitude, the biggest ever recorded there. It was 2:46 in the afternoon, and the center was two hundred and fifty miles northeast of Tokyo, in an unhelpfully shallow part of the seabed. Train lines were turned into ribbons, debris fell wildly, an oil refinery caught fire. (It was strangely disorienting to see those pictures so soon after the news of another refinery, thousands of miles away in Libya, hit by an airstrike. We get our destruction in many forms.)
According to the Times, other burning buildings became floating torches when the ocean began to move, as a tsunami followed the earthquake. A ship with a hundred people on it has reportedly disappeared, as if it had sailed into one of those mythical magnetic corners of the sea. In one city, Sendai, in northern Japan, the police say that they have already found more than two hundred bodies; the counting has just begun. The tsunami wave, meanwhile, kept rolling across the Pacific, and is hitting Hawaii just about now. (Thankfully, it does not seem to be taking a toll like that of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, thanks to the warning time.)
The scenes from Japan are awful. And yet: If you need evidence of why earthquakes are political and economic, almost as much as natural, experiences, look at the pictures from Japan, and the accompanying charts. Then remember the ones from Haiti. This is not to diminish what Japan is going through now, and the terror of the day for the people there; this has been a major blow, and many people are dead. Still, the Times noted that the quake “was so powerful that buildings in central Tokyo, designed to withstand major earthquakes, swayed.” They bent; but they didn’t break. Other structures, particularly those hit by jackhammers of water, did, and cities in the north have been hit harder than Tokyo, but the capital hasn’t been flattened in anything like the way Port au Prince was. (We’ll have to see if the quake reveals, as the one in China did, horribly, with schools, if certain builders have dodged the earthquake codes.) Not every element of Japan’s sophisticated infrastructure is unambiguously helpful in this situation, though. The country has fifty-five nuclear reactors, and this morning there was something of a struggle on (successful so far) to shut them down. And the quake that struck Haiti did not have the immediate hit on the stock market that this one has already had. On television this morning, reporters were switching between charts tracking the Nikkei and ones measuring the waves approaching Hawaii.
Also: we have seen, in recent weeks, how social media interacts with political crises. How now, with a natural disaster? Twitter was certainly a resource this morning—the phones went dead for a while in Japan, but the Internet didn’t. And Google has offered up its people finder.
President Obama was woken up at 4 a.m., and will be speaking about the earthquake later this morning. He’s said that the United States “stands ready to help the Japanese people in this time of great trial.” People in Hawaii and California are being warned not go near the beach and watch the water, even if it looks still.
Read more from our coverage of the earthquake and its aftermath.
Photograph: AP Photo/Yasushi Kanno, The Yomiuri Shimbun.
