Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida yesterday staged a televised disaster drill based on a fictional earthquake in the capital region, as his country marked the centennial of the real-life 1923 Great Kanto Quake that killed more than 100,000 people.
The magnitude 7.9 earthquake that struck the Sagamihara area southwest of Tokyo on Sept. 1, 1923, just before noon triggered a widespread inferno in the region, causing most of the victims to perish in the fire. The blaze destroyed nearly 300,000 Japanese paper-and-wood homes, as the country suffered major social and economic damage just as it was seeking to modernize.
In the aftermath, thousands of ethnic Koreans were killed as police and others responded to baseless rumors that Koreans were poisoning wells. The rampage has never fully been acknowledged by the government.
Photo: AP
Japanese officials are worried another devastating tremblor could happen again. The drill yesterday simulated the aftermath of a fictional magnitude 7.3 temblor in central Tokyo at 7am. Kishida and his Cabinet ministers, wearing matching light-blue uniforms, walked to the prime minister’s office for an emergency response meeting to discuss initial measures with hypothetically hard-hit Sagamihara City, the 1923 epicenter.
Japan, which sits on the so-called Pacific “ring of fire,” is one of most quake-prone countries in the world. A magnitude 9.0 quake on March, 11, 2011, off Japan’s northeastern coast triggered a massive tsunami, killed more than 18,000 and triggered a nuclear disaster.
Earthquake drills were also conducted at municipalities and schools across the nation. At elementary schools, children squatted under desks to protect their heads from falling objects.
Kishida was to join a joint earthquake drill hosted by Sagamihara and joined by eight citie, including Tokyo.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters that Sept. 1 this year represents more than the centennial of the Great Kanto Quake. It serves as a lesson to building structures with more resilience to quakes and fire.
“We will not let the memories of the Great Kanto Quake weather away and [will] do our utmost to take comprehensive measures” as the country braces for another big one in Tokyo and elsewhere, Matsuno said.
In other news, Japan’s summer this year was the country’s hottest since records began in 1898, the weather agency said yesterday.
“Average temperatures in Japan are the highest for summer since 1898,” the agency said.
From June to last month, the agency recorded “considerably higher” average summer temperatures in “northern, eastern and western Japan,” it said in a statement.
“The average temperature anomaly in Japan, based on observations at 15 locations, was +1.76oC, far exceeding that of 2010 (+1.08oC), which was the highest since statistics began in 1898 and the highest for summer,” it said.
“Warm air tended to cover northern Japan and warm air flowed in from the south, resulting in considerably higher average summer temperatures in northern, eastern, and western Japan,” it added.
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