1923 Great Kantō earthquake
The Great Kantō earthquake struck the Kantō Plain on the Japanese main island of Honshū at 11:58:44 JST on Saturday, September 1, 1923. Varied accounts indicate the duration of the earthquake was between ten minutes; the earthquake had a magnitude of 7.9 on the moment magnitude scale, with its focus deep beneath Izu Ōshima Island in Sagami Bay. The cause was a rupture of part of the convergent boundary where the Philippine Sea Plate is subducting beneath the Okhotsk Plate along the line of the Sagami Trough; this earthquake devastated Tokyo, the port city of Yokohama, the surrounding prefectures of Chiba and Shizuoka, caused widespread damage throughout the Kantō region. The earthquake's force was so great that in Kamakura, over 60 km from the epicenter, it moved the Great Buddha statue, which weighs about 93 short tons two feet. Estimated casualties totaled about 142,800 deaths, including about 40,000 who went missing and were presumed dead. According to the Japanese construction company Kajima Kobori Research's conclusive report of September 2004, 105,385 deaths were confirmed in the 1923 quake.
The damage from this natural disaster was the greatest sustained by prewar Japan. In 1960, the government declared September 1, the anniversary of the quake, as an annual "Disaster Prevention Day"; because the earthquake struck at lunchtime when many people were cooking meals over fire, many people died as a result of the many large fires that broke out. Some fires developed into firestorms. Many people died; the single greatest loss of life was caused by a fire tornado that engulfed the Rikugun Honjo Hifukusho in downtown Tokyo, where about 38,000 people were incinerated after taking shelter there following the earthquake. The earthquake broke water mains all over the city, putting out the fires took nearly two full days until late in the morning of September 3. A strong typhoon centered off the coast of the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture brought high winds to Tokyo Bay at about the same time as the earthquake; these winds caused fires to spread rapidly. The Emperor and Empress were staying at Nikko when the earthquake struck Tokyo, were never in any danger.
Many homes were buried or swept away by landslides in the mountainous and hilly coastal areas in western Kanagawa Prefecture. A collapsing mountainside in the village of Nebukawa, west of Odawara, pushed the entire village and a passenger train carrying over 100 passengers, along with the railway station, into the sea. A tsunami with waves up to 10 m high struck the coast of Sagami Bay, Bōsō Peninsula, Izu Islands, the east coast of Izu Peninsula within minutes; the tsunami caused many deaths, including about 100 people along Yui-ga-hama Beach in Kamakura and an estimated 50 people on the Enoshima causeway. Over 570,000 homes were destroyed. Evacuees were transported by ship from Kantō to as far as Kobe in Kansai; the damage is estimated to have exceeded US$1 billion. There were 57 aftershocks. Ethnic Koreans were massacred after the earthquake; the Home Ministry declared martial law and ordered all sectional police chiefs to make maintenance of order and security a top priority. A false rumor was spread that Koreans were taking advantage of the disaster, committing arson and robbery, were in possession of bombs.
Anti-Korean sentiment was heightened by fear of the Korean independence movement. In the confusion after the quake, mass murder of Koreans by mobs occurred in urban Tokyo and Yokohama, fueled by rumors of rebellion and sabotage; the government reported 231 Koreans were killed by mobs in Tokyo and Yokohama in the first week of September. Independent reports said the number of dead was far higher, ranging from 6,000 to 10,000; some newspapers reported the rumors as fact, including the allegation that Koreans were poisoning wells. The numerous fires and cloudy well water, a little-known effect of a large quake, all seemed to confirm the rumors of the panic-stricken survivors who were living amidst the rubble. Vigilante groups set up roadblocks in cities, tested residents with a shibboleth for Korean-accented Japanese: deporting, beating, or killing those who failed. Army and police personnel colluded in the vigilante killings in some areas. Of the 3,000 Koreans taken into custody at the Army Cavalry Regiment base in Narashino, Chiba Prefecture, 10% were killed at the base, or after being released into nearby villages.
Moreover, anyone mistakenly identified as Korean, such as Chinese and Japanese speakers of some regional dialects, suffered the same fate. About 700 Chinese from Wenzhou, were killed. A monument commemorating this was built in 1993 in Wenzhou. In response, the government called upon the police to protect Koreans; the chief of police of Tsurumi is reported to have publicly drunk the well water to disprove the rumor that Koreans had been poisoning wells. In some towns police stations into which Korean people had escaped were attacked by mobs, whereas in other neighbourhoods, residents took steps to protect them; the Army distributed flyers denying the rumor and warning civilians against attacking Koreans, but in many cases vigilante activity only ceased as a result of Army operations against it. In several documented cases and policemen participated in the killings, in other cases authorities handed groups of Koreans over to local vigilantes, who proceeded to kill them. Amidst the mob violence against Korea
Cape Irōzaki
Cape Irōzaki is the southernmost point on the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. Irōzaki Lighthouse stands on the cape; the town of Minamiizu is nearby. Iro Shrine is built in the rocks of the cape. Media related to Cape Iro at Wikimedia Commons
Izu Peninsula
The Izu peninsula is a large mountainous peninsula with indented coasts to the west of Tokyo on the Pacific coast of the island of Honshū, Japan. The eponymous Izu Province, Izu peninsula is now a part of Shizuoka Prefecture; the peninsula has an area of 1,421.24 km² and its estimated population in 2005 was 473,942 people. The populated areas lie on the north and east. Tectonically, the Izu peninsula results from the Philippine Sea Plate colliding with the Okhotsk Plate at the Nankai Trough; the Philippine Sea Plate, the Amurian Plate, the Okhotsk Plate meet at Mount Fuji, a triple junction. The peninsula itself lies on the Philippine Sea Plate; the southern portion of the peninsula is composed of breccia, the central and northern portions consist of numerous eroded volcanoes. The Amagi Mountain Range dominates the center of the peninsula with Mount Amagi and Mount Atami in the east and Mount Daruma in the west, with the eastern and western portions of the range extending underwater into Sagami Bay and Suruga Bay.
The peninsula's major river, the Kano River in the north, flows through a graben valley created by plate tectonics. As a result of its underlying geology, the peninsula is prone to frequent earthquake swarms and tsunamis, it abounds in hot springs. All of Izu Peninsula is within Shizuoka Prefecture, it is divided administratively into 8 cities and 5 towns: Atami Itō Izu Izunokuni Mishima Shimoda Kamo District – Higashiizu Kamo District – Kawazu Kamo District – Matsuzaki Kamo District – Minamiizu Kamo District – Nishiizu A popular resort region for tourists from the Kantō region, the Izu peninsula is known for onsen hot spring resorts in Atami, Itō. The peninsula is a part of Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park; the area is popular for sea bathing, surfing and motorcycle touring. Aside from tourism and fishing are the mainstays of the local economy. Izu is one of the biggest producers of wasabi in Japan, the local cuisine offers dishes flavored with wasabi; these industries are not lucrative enough to prevent a heavy loss of population to Greater Tokyo and Shizuoka among the young.
The northern parts of Izu peninsula is accessible from Tokyo and points west via the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, which has stations in both Atami in the northeast and Mishima in the northwest. JR Itō Line and the Izu Kyūkō Line provides service along the east coast of the peninsula to Shimoda, however given the lack of population, these services are less regular. Central Izu is served by the Sunzu Line as far as Shuzenji; the west coast of the peninsula is less developed, has no train service. Izu Peninsula is served by numerous expressways. By car, it is 103.3 km from the Yōga Interchange on the Tokyo end of the Tōmei Expressway to Numazu. To get to the eastern side, a branch at Atsugi leads to the Odawara-Atsugi Road, which continues past Odawara to Yugawara and Shimoda. Izu Peninsula is served by Japan National Route 135, Japan National Route 136, Japan National Route 414. Izu offers two scenic roads, called "Izu Skyline" and "Western Izu Skyline" (西伊豆スカイライン）that offer beautiful views on nature and Mt. Fuji.
Both skyline roads are favorite spots of motorcycle enthusiasts. The Odakyu Electric Railway runs local bus services from Odawara and Hakone, there is an extensive but infrequent internal bus network. Izu Peninsula Geopark Izu Peninsula - Encyclopædia Britannica Online Eastern Area - Shizuoka Guide "Izu Peninsula". - Japan National Tourist Organization
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Jōgashima
Jōgashima is a Japanese island of the municipality of Miura, Kanagawa Prefecture, off the southernmost and western tip of Miura Peninsula, facing Sagami Bay. It is home to the Jōgashima Lighthouse, the fourth oldest western style lighthouse to be built in Japan. Jōgashima is connected to the mainland by a box-girder bridge since 1959, the longest in Asia as of 1963
Typhoon
A typhoon is a mature tropical cyclone that develops between 180° and 100°E in the Northern Hemisphere. This region is referred to as the Northwestern Pacific Basin, is the most active tropical cyclone basin on Earth, accounting for one-third of the world's annual tropical cyclones. For organizational purposes, the northern Pacific Ocean is divided into three regions: the eastern and western; the Regional Specialized Meteorological Center for tropical cyclone forecasts is in Japan, with other tropical cyclone warning centers for the northwest Pacific in Hawaii, the Philippines and Hong Kong. While the RSMC names each system, the main name list itself is coordinated among 18 countries that have territories threatened by typhoons each year A hurricane is a storm that occurs in the Atlantic Ocean or the northeastern Pacific Ocean, a typhoon occurs in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, a tropical cyclone occurs in the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean. Within the northwestern Pacific, there are no official typhoon seasons as tropical cyclones form throughout the year.
Like any tropical cyclone, there are a few main requirements for typhoon formation and development: sufficiently warm sea surface temperatures, atmospheric instability, high humidity in the lower to middle levels of the troposphere, enough Coriolis effect to develop a low pressure center, a pre-existing low level focus or disturbance, a low vertical wind shear. While the majority of storms form between June and November, a few storms do occur between December and May. On average, the northwestern Pacific features the most numerous and intense tropical cyclones globally. Like other basins, they are steered by the subtropical ridge towards the west or northwest, with some systems recurving near and east of Japan; the Philippines receive the brunt of the landfalls, with China and Japan being impacted less. Some of the deadliest typhoons in history have struck China. Southern China has the longest record of typhoon impacts for the region, with a thousand-year sample via documents within their archives.
Taiwan has received the wettest known typhoon on record for the northwest Pacific tropical cyclone basins. The term typhoon is the regional name in the northwest Pacific for a severe tropical cyclone, whereas hurricane is the regional term in the northeast Pacific and northern Atlantic. Elsewhere this is called severe tropical cyclone, or severe cyclonic storm; the Oxford English Dictionary cites Urdu ṭūfān and Chinese tai fung giving rise to several early forms in English. The earliest forms -- "touffon" "tufan", "tuffon", others—derive from Urdu ṭūfān, with citations as early as 1588. From 1699 appears "tuffoon" "tiffoon", derived from Chinese with spelling influenced by the older Urdu-derived forms; the modern spelling "typhoon" dates to 1820, preceded by "tay-fun" in 1771 and "ty-foong", all derived from the Chinese tai fung. The Urdu source word توفان ṭūfān comes from the Persian (Persian: توفان/طوفان tūfān meaning "storm" which comes from the verb (Persian: توفیدن/طوفیدن tūfīdan; the word طوفان is derived from Arabic as coming from ṭāfa, to turn round.
The Chinese source is the word tai taifeng. The modern Japanese word, 台風, is derived from Chinese; the first character is used to mean "pedestal" or "stand", but is a simplification of the older Chinese character 颱, which means "typhoon". The Ancient Greek Τυφῶν has secondarily contaminated the word; the Persian term may have been influenced by the Greek word. A tropical depression is the lowest category that the Japan Meteorological Agency uses and is the term used for a tropical system that has wind speeds not exceeding 33 knots. A tropical depression is upgraded to a tropical storm should its sustained wind speeds exceed 34 knots. Tropical storms receive official names from RSMC Tokyo. Should the storm intensify further and reach sustained wind speeds of 48 knots it will be classified as a severe tropical storm. Once the system's maximum sustained winds reach wind speeds of 64 knots, the JMA will designate the tropical cyclone as a typhoon—the highest category on its scale. From 2009 the Hong Kong Observatory started to further divide typhoons into three different classifications: typhoon, severe typhoon and super typhoon.
A typhoon has wind speed of 64-79 knots, a severe typhoon has winds of at least 80 knots, a super typhoon has winds of at least 100 knots. The United States' Joint Typhoon Warning Center unofficially classifies typhoons with wind speeds of at least 130 knots —the equivalent of a strong Category 4 storm in the Saffir-Simpson scale—as super typhoons. However, the maximum sustained wind speed measurements that the JTWC uses are based on a 1-minute averaging period, akin to the U. S.' National Hurricane Center and Central Pacific Hurricane Center. As a result, the JTWC's wind reports are higher than JMA's measurements, as the latter is based on a 10-minute averaging interval. There are six main requirements for tropical cyclogenesis: sufficiently warm sea surface temperatures, atmospheric instability, high humidity in the lower to middle levels of the troposphere, enough Coriol
Kamakura
Kamakura is a city in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Although Kamakura proper is today rather small, it is described in history books as a former de facto capital of Japan, the nation's most populous settlement from 1200 to 1300 AD, as the seat of the shogunate and of the Regency during the Kamakura period. Kamakura was designated as a city on November 3, 1939; as of September 1, 2016, the modern city has an estimated population of 172,302, a population density of 4,358.77 persons per km2. The total area is 39.53 km2. As a coastal city with a high number of seasonal festivals, as well as ancient Buddhist and Shinto shrines and temples, Kamakura is a popular tourist destination within Japan. Surrounded to the north and west by hills and to the south by the open water of Sagami Bay, Kamakura is a natural fortress. Before the construction of several tunnels and modern roads that now connect it to Fujisawa and Zushi, on land it could be entered only through narrow artificial passes, among which the seven most important were called Kamakura's Seven Entrances, a name sometimes translated as "Kamakura's Seven Mouths".
The natural fortification made Kamakura an defensible stronghold. Before the opening of the Entrances, access on land was so difficult that the Azuma Kagami reports that Hōjō Masako came back to Kamakura from a visit to Sōtōzan temple in Izu bypassing by boat the impassable Inamuragasaki cape and arriving in Yuigahama. Again according to the Azuma Kagami, the first of the Kamakura shōguns, Minamoto no Yoritomo, chose it as a base because it was his ancestors' land because of these physical characteristics. To the north of the city stands Mt. Genji, which passes behind the Daibutsu and reaches Inamuragasaki and the sea. From the north to the east Kamakura is surrounded by Mt. Rokkokuken, Mt. Ōhira, Mt. Jubu, Mt. Tendai, Mt. Kinubari, which extend all the way to Iijimagasaki and Wakae Island, on the border with Kotsubo and Zushi. From Kamakura's alluvional plain branch off numerous narrow valleys like the Urigayatsu, Shakadōgayatsu, Ōgigayatsu, Kamegayatsu and Matsubagayatsu valleys.. Kamakura is crossed by the Namerigawa river, which goes from the Asaina Pass in northern Kamakura to the beach in Yuigahama for a total length of about 8 kilometres.
The river marks the border between Yuigahama. In administrative terms, the municipality of Kamakura borders with Yokohama to the north, with Zushi to the east, with Fujisawa to the west, it includes many areas outside the Seven Entrances as Yamanouchi, Koshigoe and Ofuna, is the result of the fusion of Kamakura proper with the cities of Koshigoe, absorbed in 1939, absorbed in 1948, with the village of Fukasawa, absorbed in 1948. North-west of Kamakura lies Yamanouchi called Kita-Kamakura because of the presence of East Japan Railway Company's Kita-Kamakura Station. Yamanouchi, was technically never a part of historical Kamakura since it is outside the Seven Entrances. Yamanouchi was the northern border of the city during the shogunate, the important Kobukorozaka and Kamegayatsu Passes, two of Kamakura's Seven Entrances, led directly to it, its name at the time used to be Sakado-gō. The border post used to lie about a hundred meters past today's Kita-Kamakura train station in Ofuna's direction.
Although small, Yamanouchi is famous for its traditional atmosphere and the presence, among others, of three of the five highest-ranking Rinzai Zen temples in Kamakura, the Kamakura Gozan. These three great temples were built here because Yamanouchi was the home territory of the Hōjō clan, a branch of the Taira clan which ruled Japan for 150 years. Among Kita-Kamakura's most illustrious citizens were artist Isamu Noguchi and movie director Yasujirō Ozu. Ozu is buried at Engaku-ji. Kamakura's defining feature is a Shinto shrine in the center of the city. A 1.8-kilometre road runs from Sagami Bay directly to the shrine. This road is known as the city's main street. Built by Minamoto no Yoritomo as an imitation of Kyoto's Suzaku Ōji, Wakamiya Ōji used to be much wider, delimited on both sides by a 3 metre deep canal and flanked by pine trees. Walking from the beach toward the shrine, one passes through three torii, or Shinto gates, called Ichi no Torii, Ni no Torii and San no Torii. Between the first and the second lies Geba Yotsukado which, as the name indicates, was the place where riders had to get off their horses in deference to Hachiman and his shrine.
100 metres after the second torii, the dankazura, a raised pathway flanked by cherry trees that marks the center of Kamakura, begins. The dankazura becomes wider so that it will look longer than it is when viewed from the shrine, its entire length is under the direct administration of the shrine. Minamoto no Yoritomo made his father-in-law Hōjō Tokimasa and his men carry by hand the stones to build it to pray for the safe delivery of his son Yoriie; the dankazura used to go all the way to Geba, but it was drastically shortened during the 19th century to make way for the newly constructed Yokosuka railroad line. In Kamakura, wide streets are called Ōji 、narrower ones Kōji, the small streets that connect the two are called zushi, intersections tsuji. Komachi Ōji and Ima Kōji run east and west of Wakamiya Ōji, while Yoko Ōji, the roa
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Media related to Sagami Bay at Wikimedia Commons}
Coordinates: 35°07′N 139°23′E / 35.117°N 139.383°E
