Earthquakes!

It's spring break and I am currently in an NHK studio filtering submitted comments on the webpage of the Spring High School Baseball Championships. Around 9:45am, the live baseball programme cut out and was replaced by an emergency broadcast of an earthquake in Ishikawa prefecture of M7.1. This earthquake was followed immediately by a tsunami warning, telling citizens who were near the coastline to evacuate immediately. What was most impressive was that within seconds, they showed on TV the estimated arrival time of the tsunami, and its size: 9:50am, 50cm.

Thus, residents had 5 minutes to evacuate, and could expect a maximum rise in tide of 50cm. How crazy is that!!

Ever since the Kobe and Hokkaido earthquakes in the late 1990's, Japan has buffed up their earthquake notification system, as well as strengthening all its buildings. They take it so seriously that architects and real estate agencies who fail to follow the earthquake-resistant building codes have been punished stringently by the Supreme Court. Times like these Japan impresses me.