Tie Japanese Tidal Wave.

Hastings Standard, Issue 106, 28 August 1896, Page 4

Tie Japanese Tidal Wave.

DETAILS OF THE CATAS TEOPHE.

Tokio (Japan;, June 26. The horror of Japan's calamity—the visitation of the tidal wave—grows a.- th.> retails become known more frilly. On 'r ; .» loth of June, at 8.30 in the r\(*i iii_ a ~t.-i.-mie wave struck the »orrh-«-ast coast of the main island ;'-,n u r hout a distance of about 200 mii< and in live minutes 30,000 people killed and 12,000 houses destroyed. This is the whole story. In the case of inundations, cyclones, or even earthquakes, there is a record of more or less continuous mischief, and of more or less successful struggle against the forces of destruction. But in the case of a seismic wave one stupendous blow accomplishes the whole calamity in an instant. At 8.30 the inhabitants of numerous towns and hamlets along the coast were celebrating the " Boys' Festival on the fifth day of the fifth month, according to the old calendar ; at 8.30 30,000 of them had been swept out to sea or thrown dead upon the shore, and 8,000 of their homes had disappeared or lay wrecked. There was nothing to presage the disaster. From eleven o'clock in the forenoon until 4.30 in the afternoon heavy rain fell. It was followed by a fine evening and a dark, cool night. There is much difficulty in obtaining perfectly accurate statements as to the times of phenomena that preceded the final catastrophe; they were too insignificant to seem worth recording. Several accounts agree, however, that at 7.30 o'clock three or four shocks of earthquake were felt ; not violent shocks, though of the vertical kind that folks iu Japan have learned to dread. The barometer gave at the time no indication of anything unusual. Some twenty or twenty-five minutes later a booming sound became audible from the direction of the sea. It appears to have been variously interpreted. Some construed it as the noise of a coming gale *, others supposed that a huge school of sardines hail reached the offing; and others thought that there was a question of whales. Only a very few suspected the real significance of the sound, and fled inland at the top of their speed. Rapidly the noise increased, until it assumed the volume and deafening din of a great park of artillery, and then, in a moment, waves from 20ft to 30ft high were thundering aga.ii.st the shore. The places where the actual totals of deaths reached the highest figures were sot •fcraya those that suffered ' 1 v'i«

moit in proportion to their population, j Of the three prefectures visited by the , wavu—lwate, Miyagi, and Aomori — Iwate had by far the largest aggregate of disasters, its list of death amounting to 20,000. Some of the details, however, convey a more graphic idea of the facts than any general statement can suggest. The terrible totals at this writing are 29,073 killed, 7,737 wounded, and 7.841 houses washed away or wrecked. The scene presented bv the devestated districts is shocking. Along the beach the timbers of the wrecked houses lie piled upon each other. Mosscovered roofs of thatch that sheltered happy families a few days ago in quiet country nooks are strewn pellmell on the sands. Here, houses that have had their walls torn away stand, mere skeletons ; there others have been wrenched from their foundations, telescoped into each other, tumbled upside down, or heaped together in shattered confusion. In one instance the immense mass of water, rushing up a narrow inlet, tore from their foundations the houses on either side and drove them with terrific force into the high land ahead, where now they lie crushed in a confused mass of timber, thatch, and wreckage of all kinds, the grave of many a mangled body. Considering that the advent of the I great wave was immediately preceded by earthquake shocks whose vertical character precludes the hypothesis that they were due to the stupendous rolling of the wave itself, the most reasonable conclusion appears to be that a submarine volcanic eruption took place somewhere within the area of ocean bounded by the 142deg. and 143deg. meridians of east longitude and the 39th and 40th parallels of north latitude. The Bandai-san phenomenon of 1886 illustrates very vividly the kind of disturbance that may at any moment occur among the ranges of volcanic mountains on the ocean's bed. At Bandai-san millions of tons of earth and rocks are hurled in a given direction with force that carried an enormous wave of solid material over a distance of many miles at railway speed. Anything of that kind happening at the bottom of the sea would evidently produce surface effects precisely such as those experienced on the 15th June. That the water had been thrown up from great depths to swell the bulk of the colossal billow is proved by the fact that deep-sea shell-fish were found in the hills visited by the wave. Moreover, at one place lying beyond the destructive range of the wave, the fisherman next morning found their seines Moating on the surface upside down. They had evidently been cast up by some submarine commotion. It may be added here that since the catastrophe the fish seem to have deserted the upper waters. A few can be caught now only by using the deepest seines, the great bulk having apparently gone down to inaccessible depths. A shocking feature of these phenomena is their savage energy of destruction. In the valleys below Bandai-san men's bodies, when not torn limb from limb, were battered out of all human shape. No wonder that such was the case, for so stupendous was the atmospheric disturbance that it not only levelled forests to the ground, but also stripped the trees of bark and twigs, reducing them to blanched skeletons. And now, in the case of the Iwate wave, corpses recovered within a few hours of death looked as though they had undergone a week's decomposition. The wounds suffered by the survivors and shown by the bodies of the dead are also of a shocking description. In some cases the flesh is torn into shreds, exposing the bones beneath ; in others the eyes are forced out of the sockets ; in others the trunks seemed to have been wrenched asunder by forces acting in opposite directions ; in others the skin looked as though it had been plunged in boiling water, and almost every corpse shows purple spots as if it had been fiercely belted with fragments of stone or iron. It is expected that over 30 per cent, of the survivors now receiving the local treatment will succumb. Then the tale of deaths will considerably exceed 30,000.