Following in the wake of the 921 earthquake, a Taiwan publishing house has already dusted off old copies of a 1996 book entitled Taiwan's Killer Quake and is sending the book back to press for a new print run.
The book, written by a husband-and-wife team and originally titled The Quake of 1935, details the "big one" of 1935, which at the time was the deadliest natural disaster in Taiwan's history.
Old people don't call that earthquake the "quake of '35," they call it the "quake of the 10th year of the Showa era," using the Japanese calendar term they are still familiar with. The earthquake struck during the Japanese colonial period.
Most of the original material for the book came from newspapers of the period, translated from the first-person accounts in Japanese of Taiwanese who witnessed the phenomenon under colonial rule. Since the research was done almost 60 years after the 1935 quake, when most of the eyewitnesses were dead, there are few oral accounts in the book.
The 1935 killer quake was not only one of the biggest earthquakes in Taiwan, but also one of the most "forgotten" ones. To read more about the book, see Joyce Yen's column "What Taiwan is Reading" on page 21 today.
TECRO to honor US rescue workers
Dean Tills, one of the members of the Fairfax County (Virginia) Search and Rescue Team that helped out in rescue efforts here after the 921 quake, told Off the Beat by e-mail that the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US plans to honor the team at a dinner in Washington on Oct. 6.
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