CONNECT CULTURE
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big part of life in Aki, Kochi, is disaster culture—and as it happens, I live there.
South-easterly situated on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, Kochi Prefecture is swelteringly humid, with some ALTs calling it “the Florida of Japan.” Its tropical climate means Kochi is prone to storms and full-blown typhoons, with monsoons arriving in June and lasting until July. Thanks to global warming, this weather is becoming more extreme. Within Kochi, the City of Aki, with a population of 16,000 people, is right by tsunami-affected coastline. To make matters worse, Aki faces the southwestern end of the Nankai Trough: an ocean trench created by the convergent plate tectonics of the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasan Plate. These plates are moving towards each other at a speed of several centimetres per year. Subsequent strain from this convergence gets released every 100 to 150 years in the form of mega earthquakes, more simply called Nankai, triggering massive 40 |
tsunamis. These Nankai often occur in pairs. Over 700 kilometres of Japanese coastline may be affected by the next Nankai, depending on its epicentre. Estimated to cost a whopping ¥215 trillion (£1.3 trillion) in damage, the next Nankai is 70-80% likely to happen within the next 30 years. The tsunami resulting from the next Nankai is predicted to be 34 metres high in Kochi, with an estimated arrival time of 2 minutes. People, like me, who are from natural disastersafe havens like England are unprepared for events like these. So how do the Japanese in Aki and elsewhere in the country deal with those all-too-real threats? According to Ono Tatsuo, a life-long Aki resident who survived the magnitude 8.4 Nankai in 1946, very practically. “It’s important,” Mr. Ono begins, “to have multiple evacuation routes and to know your local area.” He said to identify boggy areas, to heed sirens, and to leave shoes and a torch by your bedside. “There’s nothing to do apart from get on with it.”
