Asahi Shimbun/Reuters
At exactly 15 minutes to three in the afternoon, on Friday, March 11, 2011, Japanese time, in the moments just preceding the 9-magnitude earthquake that in the space of three minutes would wreak more havoc on Japan than that country has experienced since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Natsuko Komura was riding a horse along the Pacific coast in the northeastern city of Sendai. Rie Wakabayashi, 36, sat in a bus in Tokyo bound for a business meeting in the high-end Roppongi Hills complex. Chris Nixon, a 35-year-old American employed in the financial services sector, was working from his home in Chiba prefecture, next to Tokyo, his new wife, Aya, nearby.
In those same moments, 125 km off Japan’s east coast and 10 km beneath the ocean surface, the Pacific plate abruptly dove under its tectonic neighbour—the North American plate atop which northern Japan sits. That geological event, the consequence of eons’ worth of pent up energy, tore a gap into the Earth’s crust 400 km long and 160 km wide and pushed Honshu, Japan’s long main island, almost three metres. So gargantuan was the shift, scientists later calculated, that it rejigged the position of Earth’s axis by 16 cm and sped the planet’s rotation up by 1.6 microseconds, imperceptibly shortening our days. It was the largest quake in Japan’s history and tied for fourth largest in the world since 1900.
Just as Wakabayashi felt the ground move, then begin to shudder violently for more than two minutes, her transit bus had rolled under a Tokyo overpass; so intense was the quake that she feared it would collapse and crush her. Around 370 km north of her, in Sendai, Komura jumped off her horse, ran to her car and sped away from the coast. “The traffic lights had stopped working and there was massive congestion—rows and rows of cars,” she later told the BBC. In Chiba, Nixon and Aya stepped outside their home and held onto an outer wall.
KYODO/Reuters
Lebanese national Carole Chemali, a student at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, told Maclean’s she’d never felt anything like it. “I ran under the table. Then it started coming in waves, and the building was squeezed. You could hear it cracking. It feels like being punched. You want it to stop so badly, it’s all you want,” she said. “My Taiwanese friend was crying, and screaming. I was yelling, ‘Stop!, Stop!’ and praying.”
Not far away in Urayasu, east of Tokyo, the Earth’s movement twisted sidewalks with a grotesque licorice ease. Across the region, high rises swayed, looming left and right, for a full three minutes. Up and down Japan’s eastern coast, fires broke out. Engulfed in flames, an oil refinery in Ishihara, a city in Chiba, became the picture of Dante’s hell.
The temblor prompted the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, based in Hawaii, to issue alerts in regions stretching from Japan to Oregon and California, and triggered similar warnings to sound in over 50 countries and territories around the Pacific Ocean. A radio announcer reporting live on the quake from northern Japan described ships and flimsy seaside structures being dragged out to sea, a phenomenon that precedes a major tsunami. Within about an hour, a swell of ocean water displaced by that great tectonic shift washed over northeast Japan, in some places reaching 10 m high, equivalent to a three-storey building. In Sendai, a port city of a million people that’s also known, for its famed greenery, as the City of Trees, a black and shapeless mass of sea oozed over the shore, erasing the landscape.
Kyodo /AP
Amid wailing sirens, squat fishing vessels somersaulted inland upon an incoming wave travelling at speeds of 800 km/hour, fast as a jet liner. The rushing waters collected soil, the matchstick skeletons of old post-and-beam homes and burning buildings, amassing all, still ablaze and smoking, inland over rice fields, farmsteads and rambling villages. Video footage from north of Sendai in the port town of Miyako, in Iwate prefecture, showed a torrent of furious white water effortlessly picking up automobiles, the sound of their eerie, water-logged collisions like the click-clack of mah-jong tiles spread across a table.
