Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan

by Richard Lloyd Parry

On 22 May 1960, a 9.5-magnitude earthquake,4 still the most powerful ever recorded, struck the seabed off the west coast of Chile. Waves eighty feet high inundated the city of Valdivia, killing a thousand people along the coast. Twenty-two hours after the earthquake, the tsunami struck Japan, having traversed 10,500 miles of sea. It was the morning of 24 May; none but a handful of seismologists in Tokyo knew what had happened in Chile, and even they never imagined the effect it would have one day later on the far side of the Pacific. The Sanriku Coast saw the worst of it; in places, the water was more than twenty feet high. One hundred and forty-two people were killed that day, because of an occurrence in the depths of the ocean bed literally half a world away.