Status Updates From Ghosts of the Tsunami: Deat...

“The earthquake is the thing that all humans face: the banal inevitability of death. We don’t know when it'll come, but we know it will. We take refuge in elaborate precautions, but in the end they are all in vain. We think about it even when we are not thinking about it; after a while, it seems to define what we are. It comes most often for the old, but we feel it most cruelly when it takes away the young.”

It was the biggest earthquake ever known to have struck Japan, and the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. It knocked the Earth ten inches off its axis; it moved Japan four feet closer to America. In the tsunami that followed, 18,500 people were drowned, burned or crushed to death. At its peak the water was 120 feet high. Half a million people were driven out of their homes.