Abstract
Japan's combination of high seismicity and a long history has produced copious written records of historical earthquakes. Systematic collection and investigation of such historical documents began late in the 19th century. Now, almost all of Japan's known historical materials on earthquakes have been transcribed into 25 printed volumes. The collections include records of about 400 destructive earthquakes from A.D. 599 to 1872. Epicentral coordinates and magnitudes have been estimated for about half these events and details of earthquake and tsunami disasters have been summarized in catalogues. The space-time pattern of great Tokai and Nankai earthquakes is a good example of revealed earthquake history. The existing collections of historical sources, however, contain low-quality records that produce errors and fictitious (fake) earthquakes, and are difficult of full utilization because of volumes. Moreover, there are peculiar problems to Japan's historical times such as calendar and time of day. Systematic ways of estimating seismic intensities, epicenters, focal depths and magnitudes have not yet been established. Therefore, historical earthquake catalogues are yet incomplete. Constructing a reliable database of the whole historical documents in collaboration with historians to give wide-ranging researchers easy and full utilization of old earthquake records is urgent task. Revision of earthquake catalogues and construction of a seismic intensity database with international standard are also necessary.
Highlights
The seismic activity in and around Japan is very high because it is located in an active plate boundary zone where four lithospheric plates converge on one another
Though these three fields are interdisciplinarily related to one another and should collaborate closely, this paper focuses on the first field and describes the past progress, present situation and future problem of historical seismology in Japan
An older earthquake is described in Nihon Shoki and it is often said of A.D. 416 (e.g., Usami, 2002b, 2003), historical events before the early 6th century A.D. belong to a mythical age for which precise dating is almost impossible; the year of 416 is a holdover of the ultranationalistic view of history during the pre-World War II period claiming that Japan had been founded by Emperor Jin’mu in 660 B.C., which had a strong influence on the pre-1945 historical seismology as well
Summary
Purposes or contents of historical earthquake study can be categorized into three. The first is scientific observation and analysis of historical earthquakes such as underground natural phenomena, that is, historical seismology, an indispensable branch of earthquake science. The third is analysis of historical societies and people related to earthquake disasters from the viewpoint of social and human sciences (e.g., Kitahara, 1983) Though these three fields are interdisciplinarily related to one another and should collaborate closely, this paper focuses on the first field and describes the past progress, present situation and future problem of historical seismology in Japan. An older earthquake is described in Nihon Shoki and it is often said of A.D. 416 (e.g., Usami, 2002b, 2003), historical events before the early 6th century A.D. belong to a mythical age for which precise dating is almost impossible; the year of 416 is a holdover of the ultranationalistic view of history during the pre-World War II period claiming that Japan had been founded by Emperor Jin’mu in 660 B.C., which had a strong influence on the pre-1945 historical seismology as well. As for the investigation of historical natural disasters other than earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, collaboration with historical seismology has not been active in Japan so far
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