Articles : Japan Unlimited

TOKYO, Tuesday: When the Earth was young and the great gods Izanami and Izanagi ruled the universe, Awaji island was the first place they created, so Japanese legend has it.

A pretty rural backwater among the hundreds of islands in Japan's peaceful Inland Sea, Awaji-shima today gave Japanese a chilling reminder that what the gods gave, they can take away.

In the dark hours before dawn, an invisible hand took Awaji island and shook it like a dusty rug.

Thirty seconds was all it took to reduce this idyll of rice paddies and little fishing villages to a vision from Dante's Inferno.In that half-minute, the little cottages with their blue roof tiles and their wooden walls - built of wood because it is supposed to be safer, and to give a warning, like creaking pit-props, when disaster is near - disappeared from the face of the Earth.

In their place, streets piled with blazing pyres of matchwood, the cries of the injured echoing from beneath the rubble.

At least eight were dead when the plucky volunteers in their bright happi-coats pulled them free, and another 100 were hurt.

Across the bay, the sleeping city of Kobe woke with a jolt to find itself smashed and blazing with an intensity it had known only once before in its history - when General Douglas MacArthur's B29 Superfortress bombers put it to the torch with phosphorous bombs in the final days of World War II.

Already, over 2,000 people are expected dead, the greatest toll in an earthquake in Japan for nearly half a century, since the Tokyo-Yokohama disaster of 1923.

And yet the quake should have come as no surprise. The modern economic miracle that is Japan has been built smack on top of modern man's most catastrophic natural disaster waiting to happen. The question is not if, but when.

Geologically, Japan is in the middle of the most dangerous crossroads on the surface of the planet, where four great continent-sized tectonic plates constantly grind away at each other. One earthquake in 10 that occurs on Earth happens here.

All over the country you find steaming, hissing, boiling sulphurous streams, volcanoes and geysers that are the warnings that just beneath the surface a great roiling ocean of magma of unimaginable heat and pressure is trying to escape.

Japanese legend has it that a great catfish lies sleeping beneath the land, arousing itself from time to time to wreak havoc.

Just this century - and the history of earthquakes goes back to the beginning of recorded time in Japan - 155,000 people have perished in 25 major quakes.

That is more people than have died in all the road accidents in Japanese history.

Kobe was bad enough. But if the quake had struck just 450 kilometres to the north-east, it would have have dwarfed even this.

In 1923, the last time a major quake hit Tokyo, half a million homes were destroyed and 140,000 were people killed by the initial shock, the firestorm that followed and the giant tidal waves that roared up Tokyo Bay.

If it happened again tomorrow - and doomsayers have been claiming for several years that this will be the year of the "Big One", which is supposed to strike every 72 years - the damage would dwarf even this.

The National Land Agency calculated several years ago that a 1923-size quake of 7.9 or 8 on the Richter scale would kill up to 150,000 people, leave 200,000 injured and 4 million homeless.

The damage, private forecasters have calculated, would be around $2 trillion (a million multiplied by a billion) dollars.

Apart from two world wars, it would be the greatest catastrophe the planet has known in modern times. The huge sucking sound as Japan became a black hole into which the world's capital disappeared would wreak havoc on the global economy for years.

The quake that wrecked Awajishima today destroyed more than the islanders' centuries-old serenity.It reminded Japan and the world how defenceless man is in the face of the terrible wrath of Izanami and Izanagi.