History
Although there is mention of an earthquake in Yamato in what is now Nara Prefecture on August 23, 416, the first to be reliably documented took place in Nara Prefecture on May 28, 599 during the reign of Empress Suiko, destroying buildings throughout Yamato province. While many historical records of Japanese earthquakes exist, and the Imperial Earthquake Investigation Committee was created in 1892 to conduct a systematic collation of the available historical data, published in 1899 as the Catalogue of Historical Data on Japanese Earthquakes. Following the 1923 Great KantÅ earthquake, the Imperial Earthquake Investigation Committee was superseded by the Earthquake Research Institute in 1925. In modern times, the catalogues compiled by Tatsuo Usami are considered to provide the most authoritative source of information on historic earthquakes, with the 2003 edition detailing 486 that took place between 416 and 1888.
Read more about this topic: Earthquakes In Japan
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“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)