Catastrophes, cultures,and the angry earth assigment - Essay Example

It was a leap backwards to history. An earthquake took the imperial Japan to a century back! No buildings stood high in Tokyo’s frightened streets. No one held their heads high there either. Even the gloomy sky was full of dark monstrous smoke clouds. Everything stood on its head after a monster from deep beneath Izu Oshima Island in Sagami Bay paid its deadly visit to the mainland Japan. The invisible waves simply took nearly hundred and fifty thousands human lives with it. The human might that built the great cities of post-World War I was no match for the mighty shake of the earth.

Tokyo and Yokohama were no more cities but piles of rambles. The temblor stole the all-life labour of millions of toiling masses. Even the wealth of royals and the elites were not spared. The fire which spread from house to house sucked up everything in its way. Capitalists and labourers went together along the line of fire. Even the pet dogs ended up with a small meek voice. September 1, 1923 marked the end of Japan’s deeply entrenched romance with wooden houses. Two million homeless people shivered on the streets as did their houses earlier in the day.

Death and destruction triumphed over the wreckage. Displacement was at its zenith; of people, statues, landscapes, railway tracks, buildings and so on. There was no one remaining without cursing their fate. There was no one remaining not fearing the wrath of mother earth. . Slabs of plaster left the ceilings and fell about our ears, filling the air with a blinding, smothering fog of dust”. The monster that came as invisible waves from under the earth swallowed whatever existed over the earth.

After the frightening ten minutes, to add oil to the fire, there were more than two hundred after shocks. And, another three hundred aftershocks in the next couple of days. The catastrophe did not end with earthquakes, fires and tsunami. At many places, the earth was literally lifted high. The shape of the shorelines changed. The ground was dramatically uplifted and depressed. Hundreds of landslides gulped scores of villages. An immense mudslide simply buried a village called Nebukawa in Idu province besides killing hundreds of people.

The conflagration that followed the earthquake was not easy to contain. The victims who trapped in the rabbles were buried alive by the fire. Both the cities of Yokohama and Tokyo were under fire for next two days. Coal and charcoal stoves, which then were widely used, provided the necessary link for fire from one house to another. The fire was coupled with the improperly stored chemicals and fuels. More than forty thousand refugees were killed by the skyline fire at the Military Clothing Depot in Honjo Ward alone.

Fire and wind played hand in glove and neighbourhood after neighbourhood fell like dominoes for the flames. Especially in Yokohama, the fire was more villainous than the earthquake in taking the tolls. Nearly seven hundred thousand houses were fully or partially destroyed. After the earthquake, the water shortage spread like wildfire, leaving the possibility of fighting fire in complete vein. Moreover, telephone and telegraph communication