THE JAPANESE TIDAL WAVE

Mt Benger Mail, Volume 17, Issue 850, 29 August 1896, Page 4

THE JAPANESE TIDAL WAVE

DETAILS OF THE CATASTROPHE. CITIES TURNED INTO PLAINS BLACK WITH WRECKAGE. THIRTY THOUSAND PEOPLE KILLED* Tokio (Japan), June 26.—The horror of Japan's calamity—the visitation of the tidal wave—grows as the details become known more fully. On the 15th of June, at 8.30 in the evening, a seismic wave struck the north-east coast of the main island throughout a distance of about 200 miles, and in five minutes 30,000 people were killed and 12,000 houses destroyed. That 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 town* and hamlets along the coast were celebrating the "Boys Festival" on the fifth day of the fifth month, according to the old calendar; at 8.35 30,000 of them had been swept out to tea 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 in Japan have learned to dread. The barometer gave at the time no indication of anything unusual. Some twenty or twentyfive 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 had 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 against the shore. The places where the actual totals of deaths reached the highest figures were not always those that suffered most in proportion to their population. Of Ibe three prefectures visited by the wave—lwate, Miyagi, and Aomori—lwate had by far the largest aggregate of disaster, its list of dead amounting to 26,000. 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 7,844 houses warned away or wrecked. The scene presented by the devastated districts is shocking. Along the beach the timbers of the wrecked houses He piled upon eaoh other. Moss-covered 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 they now lie crushed into a confused mass of timber, thatch, and wreckage of all kinds, the grave of many a mangled body. Considering that the advent of the 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 Elace somewhere within the area of ocean ounded by the 142deg and 143deg meridians of east longitude and the 39th and 40uli 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 were 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 of 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 fishermen next morning found their seines floating 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 seam 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 their sockets; in others the trunks seem to have been wrenched asunder by forces acting in opposite directions; in others the skin looks as though it had been plunged in boilin' 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 receiviug medical treatment will suocumb. Then the tale of deaths will considerable exceed 30,000. *