Tremors and Tembatsu

This floating world is but a phantasm.

It is a momentary smoke.

-- Hakuin (an 18th century Zen monk)

Tokyo is no phantasm. The world's second most populous city is an all too real concentration of 11.5 million jam-packed people. Many of them nonetheless feared last week that Tokyo might soon become a momentary smoke, with millions dead among unparalleled destruction. One reason for their fears was rational enough: all Japan has recently experienced unusual earthquake activity. Tokyo itself has felt 29 minor earthquake jolts this year -- two last week. The other reason is superstitious: even the most modernized Japanese retain a sneaking regard for the traditional concept of tembatsu (heavenly punishment), which teaches that good times must be followed by disaster. No one can deny that Japan has been having fantastically good times.

These grim thoughts filled Japanese minds and media with the approach of Sept. 1, the 50th anniversary of one of the most devastating earthquakes known to history. It leveled and burned Tokyo and neighboring cities with a loss of 143,000 lives.

This year, Tokyoites have had still more reminders that they are, in effect, sitting on a volcano. Mount Asama, 85 miles northwest of Tokyo, literally blew its top in February. Three months later, there was an upheaval in the Pacific seabed that lifted part of the bottom of the Bonin Trench an astonishing 6,000 ft., forming a new volcano north of Iwo Jima. In June came a major quake in Hokkaido, though it caused no deaths.

In May, photographs from a U.S. satellite showed two parallel lines, running through the northern outskirts of Tokyo, that may represent faults in the earth's crust. Then Japanese seismologists were shaken up by a U.S. colleague. Columbia University's Christopher H. Scholz (TIME, Aug. 27) suggested that the Tokyo region could expect a major earthquake within the next few years. Seismologist Tsuneji Rikitake was not convinced by Scholz's reasoning--"The art of earthquake prediction is about as accurate as Chinese astrology," he snapped--but he had to concede that the danger was there. "The energy accumulation right down here [under Tokyo] must be something awesome."

Potential Bombs. The portents touched off a selling campaign by Tokyo department stores of survival kits containing medicines, canned foods and candles. The monthly magazine Soh devoted a whole issue to the catchy question "Could you survive a major earthquake?" No doubt millions of Japanese could--but their capital city probably would not.

Despite its mushroom crop of high-rise reinforced-concrete buildings, the city today is a worse firetrap than ever. Ichiro Uchibaba, an auto repairman who, as a boy of eight, survived the 1923 quake and firestorm, says: "It's worse today--these 2,000,000 cars and 3,000,-000 kerosene stoves in Tokyo are potential bombs. They would cause millions of fires."

Says Tokyo Sociologist Ikutaro Shimizu: "After the 1923 quake, Tokyo rebuilt itself into what it had been before--a state of chaos." That chaos has been compounded by a threefold increase in the population, and there are still as many flimsy, flammable wood and paper shacks as before. A major quake today, it has been estimated, might cause as many as 3,000,000 deaths. Yet most Japanese seem resigned. There is no mass exodus from Tokyo, though every new earth tremor is a jolting reminder of tembatsu.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.