Great East Japan Earthquake survivor Jun Endo learns importance of resilience in life Sorry, but your browser needs Javascript to use this site. If you re not sure how to activate it, please refer to this site: https://www.enable-javascript.com/
Jun Endo competes for Nadeshiko Japan during the 2019 World Cup in Rennes, France. | KYODO
KYODO Mar 8, 2021
Olympic soccer hopeful Jun Endo remembers shivering uncontrollably as she watched on TV as Japan beat the United States in the FIFA Women’s World Cup final in July 2011.
The match took place just four months after she experienced the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster as a fourth grader living in Shirakawa, Fukushima Prefecture, and Endo remembers telling herself she was “definitely going there” one day as a member of the national team.
Mar 8, 2021
The blue arrows on the map splay out like uncooked spaghetti tossed into a pot as geophysicist Jonathan Bedford presses play.
Ten years after the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake which upended long-held views about where megaquakes were likely to strike scientists like Bedford, a researcher with the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam, are developing new tools to better understand the threat, while others are digging deep into the past in a search for geological clues.
Each arrow on Bedford’s animated analysis represents tiny movements over time most at a speed of well under 1 millimeter per day of the Japanese archipelago, as detected by the thousands of highly accurate GPS stations that dot one of the world’s most seismically active countries. Red circles spring up now and then to mark an earthquake.
Juri Sato, left, wearing kimono with her sister, Airi, in August 2010. (Provided by their mother, Mika)
ISHINOMAKI, Miyagi Prefecture About a year ago, Juri Sato, a 13-year-old resident of Ishinomaki, wrote a story about her sister, who died in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
In the story, titled “Shiroi Hana wo Motsu Yosei” (Fairy with a white flower), a fairy holding a white flower in its hand appears in front of Riko, a junior high school student.
“This is a magical flower,” the fairy says. “It can grant your wishes, but only for three times.”
When Riko was 3, her 6-year-old sister died from a disease. Riko makes her first wish on the white flower: “I want to see my sister.”
~~
It will soon mark ten years since the Great East Japan Earthquake. Various regions in the Japanese islands are fraught with the risk of major earthquakes.
The government periodically announces predictions of earthquake probabilities, and if we are able to understand the system and utilize the information, it can contribute to disaster mitigation.
Impact of Megaquake of the Coast of Northern Japan was quantified in recent Cabinet Office study
The earth’s surface is covered with dozens of huge bedrock plates. Because the mantle beneath them is convected by the high heat of the planetary body’s interior, the plates move in all directions as they push and pull at each other.
On a cold Friday afternoon, life for millions in Japan would be changed in the span of just a few minutes. On March 11, 2011, northeastern Japan was struck by one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history. The magnitude 9 tremor caused massive damage up and down the country’s northeastern coast, with strong shaking felt several hundred kilometers away. Soon after the shaking subsided, the coastline was then hit by a devastating tsunami, which completely destroyed dozens of towns and caused over fifteen thousand deaths. The damage from the earthquake and tsunami, as well as from the accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant soon after, forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate their homes and was estimated by the World Bank to have cost over 20 trillion yen (approx. $190 billion).