Ticking Along

When you're in Tokyo, living in residence there, you become accustomed to the tremors. They happen at any time; when you're in a building somewhere, out in the open air, in your home. You sit there, tensely, waiting for it to pass. And it invariably does. Sometimes glassware tinkles in the cupboards, and sometimes, afterwards you have to straighten up pictures hanging on the wall.

You think, while you're sitting there: should I get up and stand in the doorway? You can't go down to the basement for protection, because there are no basements. You just sit there.

You think to yourself: well, there's that backpack in the front hall cupboard full of survival stuff; crank radio, flashlight, bottled water, tins of food, change of clothing. Should I just grab it and get outside, get out of the house? No need, the shaking of the house, which feels so eerie, and seems as though it's gone on for so long, stops. You breathe a sigh of relief and get on with life.

It's even more peculiar when it happens while you're on the outside, actually. Particularly if you're somewhere historical like the Temple of the 47 Ronin, for example, where there's an odd aura to begin with, and if there's a mist hanging over the place, and you're poking about in the open-air souvenir shop, when suddenly the world begins fidgeting and you wonder what's going on, until you orient yourself.

But those were ordinary events. You expect them to happen. And you get over them. And life goes on. Greater Tokyo now includes 35-million people. Since the magnitude 9.0 undersea quake that caused that tremendous, killing tsunami last March, there has been three times as many aftershocks or quakes as usual. Each and every day 1.5 quakes recorded. It doesn't make for complacency.

There's another thing about Japan. It represents the sole country on the Planet that ever suffered the horrors of nuclear attacks. Those Second-World-War atomic bombs that were dropped one after the other by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were beyond the imagination of most people in the terrifying destruction visited on people simply going about their business.

Their effect in some ways mimicked earthquakes in their dreadful impact.

Official Tokyo is aware that their scientists are telling them that more major quakes are inevitable. "We must prepare for the earthquake that will happen", according to Asahiko Taira, executive director of the government's Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. One wonders: does that agency ever communicate with Japan's nuclear agencies?

Japan experiences one-fifth of the largest earthquakes on Earth annually. The Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 levelled Tokyo when it erupted through the Earth's crust. Amazingly, for a country that is so ultra-aware, conservative in its decision-making, analytical and intelligent, it also has built 54 nuclear reactors.

Earth scientists are well aware that there is no way of predicting where a large quake will strike. So this represents a little problem. The most earthquake-prone archipelago on the Globe, three tight little islands that house approximately 127-million souls, also has a proliferation of nuclear reactors to ensure its industry keeps ticking along....