After the wrenching period yesterday, when Japan was shaken by an 8.9 magnitude quake, with more than fifty major aftershocks, and everything was moving as it shouldn’t—the ground, roads, ocean, walls, and cars that flew around as if they were toys that had been kicked—a good part of the country was unable to move as it should, or to move at all. Millions of commuters were stranded, as roads were blocked and trains stopped. There are four trains that no one can find, according to the BBC; they had been running along the coast. The Times quoted a Japanese newspaper report that six hundred people were marooned on the roof of a school in Sendai. (By Saturday morning Japanese time, about a fifth of them had been rescued.) Other people slept in high office towers because the elevators didn’t work. Lines in stores weren’t moving much either. And, in some quarters, there were more haunting stillnesses. There still isn’t good information from across Japan’s north. Estimates of the death toll rose to over thirteen hundred Saturday, and are expected to go higher.

Eleven nuclear plants shut down automatically and, by Saturday, five were in a state of emergency. Some of the plants had lost their main power supplies, either in the quake or the tsunami, and were relying on the back-ups to the back-ups—steam-powered batteries—to pump the water used to cool the reactors’ cores. After a day of seemingly unstoppable waves, there is a fight on, now, to force this water to keep moving. Radiation levels in one control room spiked to a thousand times the normal level. People who lived within 1.9 miles of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, south of Sendai, were told to evacuate; then, with news of an explosion there (the details are still unclear) the zone became six miles, then twelve; beyond that circle, those who lived within sixteen miles of the plant were told to stay inside their houses, and not go anywhere.

On Friday, no one could guess how many countries this disaster would affect, as the tsunami triggered by the quake rolled across the Pacific. By the end of the day, it seemed—with the caveat that the wave has not yet dissipated—that the damage would be done mostly to Japan. That doesn’t make it less of a common concern. At the end of President Obama’s press conference Friday, a Japanese reporter asked President Obama what his “personal thoughts and feelings” about the earthquake were. He said he was “heartbroken”:

the Japanese people are such close friends of ours, and I have such a close personal friendship and connection to the Japanese people—in part because I grew up in Hawaii where I was very familiar with Japanese culture—that that just makes our concerns that much more acute.

This was a massive quake, one for the world history books. Japan had really done most of what a country could do to prepare—building codes, evacuation drills, sea walls, seismic sensors—and the quake and tsunami still left some of its cities smashed-up. What would the death toll have been without those measures? (No one even has an accurate count of the deaths in Haiti, with estimates between a hundred thousand and three times that many.) Right now, all one wants to know is whether people are safe, and how those who have been separated can find each other. But later there will be a great deal to learn from this episode—from the way the plates beneath the ocean move to just how far in either direction a skyscraper can bend.

Read more from our coverage of the earthquake and its aftermath.

Photograph: AP Photo/The Yomiuri Shimbun


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