|
|
|
Reviews
THE ORPHAN TSUNAMI OF 1700: JAPANESE CLUES TO A PARENT EARTHQUAKE IN NORTH AMERICA
|
by Brian Atwater, Musumi-Rokkaku Satoko, Satake Kenji, Tsuji Yoshinobu, Ueda Kazue, and David K. Yamaguchi
|
| University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2005. Illustrations, photographs, maps, bibliography, index. 140 pages. $24.95 paper. |
| The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 announces itself as a "scientific detective story," and that is an apt characterization of this beautiful and unusual book (p. vi). The central question of the detective story is: What inspired multiple reports of "unusual seas" by Japanese merchants, peasants, and samurai during several days at the end of January, 1700 (p. 3)? The reporters of those events were familiar with tsunamis, which can be generated by slip on underwater faults, but no shaking preceded those anomalous water levels. The solution to the mystery, revealed in the book's first page of text, is that the surges were generated by a giant earthquake from a distant source — the Cascadia subduction zone flanking what are now British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California. |
1
|
|
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 documents historical evidence for giant earthquakes of Cascadian origin in the past, using geologic and oral sources. Part 2, by far the longest, lays out written accounts of the tsunami and its consequences at six sites along the east coast of Japan. Part 3 focuses primarily on tree-ring data that definitively links the Japanese accounts to the last major earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone, concluding with implications for hazards in the Pacific Northwest. |
2
|
|
It may seem fatal for a detective story to reveal its conclusions at the outset, but this book involves readers in detection through its structure rather than through suspense about the outcome. There are exactly five and a half pages of conventional narrative in the book — one at the beginning of each part, and a one-and-a-half-page overall introduction. The rest of the book consists of two-page elaborations on one or another detail of the detective work. Each small section has its own heading and is packed with its own set of nested details, including textual summaries of accounts, photographs, maps shown at multiple scales, figure captions, explanatory cartoons, and reproductions of primary material accompanied by footnotes about language structure. "Wetted places," for example, locates the sites of Japanese tsunami accounts on a centuries-old map of the Tokugawa shogunate during the Genroku era (p. 32). The map is beautifully reproduced and accompanied by details about its original creation. Enlargements of the key locations are shown alongside a tabular summary of the nature of each site, the profession and class of each tsunami account supplier, and the number of buildings, fields, and salt kilns lost at each site. Even the bookworm burrows are identified and labeled on the map. The effect is almost like searching for a hidden image in a tremendously busy scene — both the visual excursion and the spotting of the main object are absorbing. Literal translations of primary material promote a sense of first-hand discovery, as do photographs of the authors at work in salt marshes or archives. The ethos of the book seems to be expressed in a quote attributed to Tokugawa Mitsukuni: "In writing one must be true to fact, and the facts must be presented as exhaustively as possible. An excess of detail is preferable to excessive brevity" (p. 63). The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 succeeds in offering riches of detail in a short book partly through its mosaic approach. |
3
|
|
The book is a meticulous and comprehensive piece of scholarship that both draws on the authors' ground-breaking research and pulls together hundreds of references on the topic. Images and captions are sprinkled throughout the ten-page bibliography, like extended cinematic scenes that play through the credits. The text is highly readable and requires no special expertise, only a scientific curiosity and a willingness to participate in the assembly of discovery. |
4
|
| Elizabeth Safran
|
| Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|