The Orphan Tsunami Of 1700: Japanese Clues to A Parent Earthquake In North America, by Brian F. Atwater, Musumi-Rokkaku Satoko, Satake Kenji, Tsuji Yoshinobu, Ueda Kzue, and David K. Yamaguchi

Properly speaking, the material in this book could easily have been provided in a scholarly paper, and it is likely that the genesis of this book was in papers about the earthquake history of the Cascadia region (where, full disclosure, I happen to live at present) as well as the texts that have survived in Japan about a large orphan tsunami that caused considerable damage to a wide swath of coastal towns and villages and prompted some serious and reflective writing from local literate Japanese people from a variety of social classes. Indeed, it is the writings from these Japanese people that forms the literal and figurative heart and core of this book, and offers the poignant reminder that earthquakes and tsunamis happen in human communities and a knowledge of how to respond to them can be the difference between life and death. Even though the tsunami that hit the Pacific coast of Japan in late January of 1700 had no known earthquake at the time (or indeed, until fairly recently, at all), the response of the people on the coast was appropriate and as a result the loss of life was not nearly as bad as it could have been, even though there was no earthquake to warn the local people of the wave that was coming their way and that lack of earthquake led many Japanese to consider it like a tidal wave, because they knew that tsunamis were the result of earthquakes. 

This particular book is a short one at a bit more than 100 pages. The book begins with a helpful set of introductory material that includes insight on how to handle the Japanese text that is included in the book as well as two sets of discussions about contents, with the first one showing the three parts of the book along with maps that show the focus of earth part, and a short textual comment on the larger point of each part of the book. The second table of contents is a diglot in both English and Japanese that describes in greater detail the three parts of the book. The remaining materials of the book are divided into three parts. The first part of the book discusses unearthed earthquakes, including the earthquake potential of the Juan de Fuca plate just off the coast of Cascadia and the tsunami potential of earthquakes like Alaska 1964 and Chile 1960, along with flood stories from local tribes in the area, and the evidence of subsidence on the coast of the Pacific Northwest, all giving the possibility that a 9.0 magnitude quake could be generated by this plate boundary if the entire area was a part of the source area for an earthquake. The second part of the book, which contains the vast majority of the material of the book, consists of a discussion of the Japanese sources, of which half a dozen of them are not only described and discussed but also provided in their native Japanese script, which comment on the size of the tsunami, and which show the effects and damages of the tsunami on houses, ships, fields, and stores of food, often asking for some kind of aid in order to rebuild losses. The last part of the book then returns to North America to discuss tree ring tests which demonstrate the broad effects of a tsunami in 1700 and the lessons that we can learn about the need to seek high ground in case of another earthquake of this size, which has happened an average of once every 500 years or so. The book then ends with acknowledgements, notes about the authors, references, and an index.

When one is looking at this book, there are at least a few angles of this book that strike the reader as being potential hooks for interest. Those who are interested in the effects of a surprise tsunami on a deeply literate society that has a deep knowledge of tsunamis and a body of culture and literature and insight on how to respond to such disasters will find in the Japanese texts of part two a moving portrait of people reflecting on something that they do not quite understand. Another hook for the human interest of this story is in the poignant reminder of how the storm seems to have strongly affected the local (albeit illiterate) tribes of the Pacific Northwest, some of whom lost their homes and perhaps their lives, with some of the damage remaining buried under a substantial amount of tidal silt. The third area of human interest is for those of us who live in the region and who live in and around buildings that are designed for nowhere near the kind of earthquake loading that a 9.0 earthquake would provide, and which would create a horrific disaster with very little time to respond, except to flee to high ground and hope for the best.