After studying ancient rocks, a Japanese geologist warned that a disaster was imminent—to no avail
Peter Landers
The Wall Street Journal
4/9/2011
The giant tsunami that assaulted northern Japan’s coast surprised just about everyone. But Masanobu Shishikura was expecting it. The thought that came to mind, he says, was “yappari,” a Japanese word meaning roughly, “Sure enough, it happened.”
“It was the phenomenon just as I had envisioned it,” says the 41-year-old geologist, who has now become the Japanese Cassandra.
Dr. Shishikura’s studies of ancient earth layers persuaded him that every 450 to 800 years, colliding plates in the Pacific triggered waves that devastated areas around the modern city of Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture, as well as in Fukushima Prefecture.
One early tsunami was known to historians. Caused by the 869 Jogan quake, its waves, according to one chronicle, killed 1,000 people. Dr. Shishikura had found strong evidence of a later tsunami in the same region, which probably took place between 1300 and 1600.
“We cannot deny the possibility that [such a tsunami] will occur again in the near future,” he and colleagues wrote in August 2010. That article appeared in a journal published by the Active Fault and Earthquake Research Center in Tsukuba, the government-funded institute where Dr. Shishikura works.
He was beginning to spread the word. Plans were under way at his center to hand out maps so people would understand which areas were at risk. Dr. Shishikura had an appointment on March 23 to explain his research to officials in Fukushima.
The article continues at The Wall Street Journal.
