SYMHC Classics: Orphan Tsunami

This 2013 episode covers a tsunami that struck the coast of Japan in January 1700, . It took a while -- a long while -- to figure out where the catalyzing earthquake had been.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. On January twenty seventh, seventeen hundred, a tsunami
struck Japan, although centuries passed before anybody made the connection
between the tsunami and the earthquake that had spawned it.
That's the subject of today's Saturday Classic on what came
to be known as the Orphan Tsunami. This episode originally
came out on October twelfth, twenty sixteen. Enjoy Welcome to

(00:29):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frye. Today we're talking about a story that
has three totally distinct parts. The first part we're going

(00:50):
to talk about is that in January of seventeen hundred,
a tsunami struck the coast of Japan. And this is
a tsunami that's really well documented in records at an
art from the time period. And by this point, the
people of Japan knew that tsunamis could follow earthquakes, and
especially when it came to domestic tsunamis, where both the
tsunami and the earthquake that caused it happened there in Japan,

(01:13):
people had a really clear sense that when an earthquake struck,
a tsunami could follow. But sometimes an earthquake spawns a
tsunami that makes landfall somewhere really far away. And since
instantaneous communication over thousands of miles is an incredibly recent invention,
connecting these foreign tsunamis to the earthquakes that spawned them

(01:34):
as really the work of later scientists. After an earthquake
in Chile in nineteen sixty spawned a tsunami that struck Japan,
a worker at a weather station figured out that tsunami
that had struck Japan in sixteen eighty seven, seventeen thirty,
and seventeen fifty one had come from Peru and Chile.
This seventeen hundred tsunami continued to be a mystery for

(01:55):
one of the thirty plus years, though it became known
as the Orphans unami. And that tsunami, the earthquake that
caused it, and how people finally figured out which was
which are what we are talking about today. So the
first written record of a tsunami in Japan is from
the year six eighty four. An earthquake struck the province

(02:15):
of Tosa, now known as Kochi. Afterwards quote the province
of Tosa reported that a great tide rose and caused
many of the ships conveying tribute to sink and be lost.
The word tsunami wasn't coined until later, though. It combines
the character tsu, which means harbor, and nami, which means wave.

(02:38):
Its first use in writing is from sixteen twelve to
describe one that struck on December two of sixteen eleven,
roughly four hours after an earthquake off the coast of Japan.
This tsunami was disastrous, killing thousands and thousands of people,
and from there the word tsunami made its way into
English in the late eighteen hundreds. By the nineteen fifties,

(02:59):
it become one of the few Japanese loanwords in the
English language's physics lexicon. This known connection between earthquakes and
tsunami was so solid in the eighteenth century in Japan
that when the seventeen hundred tsunami struck, most of the
people writing about it didn't actually call it a tsunami. Instead,
almost all of the surviving written records use words like

(03:21):
high tide, flood, high water, and unusual seas. The headmen
of the village of Miho did wonder in his records
whether it was a tsunami, which is something that he
spelled out phonetically rather than using the Japanese character for tsunami,
So it's probably a word that he had heard but
didn't know how to write. But he clearly seems puzzled

(03:42):
at whether this could have been a tsunami, since there
had not been an earthquake beforehand, and we have lots
of writing from lots of different people about this particular tsunami.
In seventeen hundred, Japan was about one hundred years into
the Tokugawa Period also called the Edo Period, and this
was the nearly two hundred and fifty year span of

(04:03):
relative peace and stability under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
If you want a bit more detail about the Tokugawa
and the culture of the Edo period, there is a
lot more about it in our past podcast on Hokusai.
During this period, literacy was pretty widespread among social classes,
and the culture of governmental bureaucracy meant that there were

(04:23):
a lot of records being kept about basically everything. Records
of the tsunami survive in the paperwork of the daimyo
or the feudal lords, as well as the merchants and
people of the peasant class who were basically leaders in
their individual villages. The tsunami reached Japan on January twenty seventh,
seventeen hundred, or in the Japanese calendar, the eighth day

(04:46):
of the twelfth month of Genroku twelve. The path of
the tsunami arcd from the northeast to southwest down Japan's coast,
striking Kuwagasaki in the north, first on the twenty seventh,
close to midnight, and then moving south until it reached
to Nabe the following morning. All the surviving written records
come from towns and villages on the island of Honshu,

(05:09):
which is Japan's largest island and was also home to
the capital city of Edo, which is today Tokyo. So
we're going to walk down the path the tsunami took
from north to south, and it started at least according
to the records, in the fishing village of Kuwagasaki, which
is on the northwest edge of Miyako Bay. The tsunami

(05:29):
struck in the middle of the night without any warning,
and although the people who were living there were able
to escape to higher ground and no one was injured,
the combination of floodwaters and fires destroyed about ten percent
of the town's three hundred houses. The water itself was
responsible for the destruction of thirteen homes. The records from
Kuwagasaki are the only ones to conclusively use the word

(05:54):
tsunami to describe this seventeen hundred flood. Officials in the
neighboring town of Miyako, which was also the administrative seat
for Kuwagasaki and other villages in the area, started a
relief effort, and in the following days, stipends of rice
were distributed to one hundred and fifty nine people who
had been affected by the tsunami, and officials in Miyako

(06:15):
also requested allotments of low grade woods so that they
could build temporary shelters. The tsunami waters traveled all the
way through Miyako Bay, damaging and destroying structures along the
coast and eventually reaching the village of Sugaruishi, which was
a kilometer inland and thus caused a panic among the
people who were living there Because of the shape of

(06:37):
the bay, which funneled the water into a relatively narrow space.
The crest of the tsunami was probably the highest here,
about five meters or sixteen feet. The records at Sugarui
Shi don't mention the word tsunami, but they do mention
the absence of an earthquake. And also due to a
clerical error, these records also misrecord the date by a

(06:59):
full month. Yeah, there was this and one other thing
that both were like oops, they just noted the wrong
date there. Continuing south in the port of Otsuchi, most
of the damage was to crops. There were rice paddies
and vegetable fields that were planted close to the sea
that were destroyed. Two houses and two saltkin kilns were

(07:21):
damaged as well. In Nakamenado, high waves prevented a boat
carrying four hundred and seventy bales of rice from entering
the mouth of the river and continuing inland to its
destination of Edo. When it couldn't reach the river, the
boat dropped anchor, and as the seas got rougher, it
jettisoned part of its cargo. But then the seas continually

(07:42):
got worse. The anchor line broke and the boat was
driven into the rocks, causing the loss of the rest
of its cargo, which was twenty eight metric tons of rice,
and the deaths of two of its crew. Of all
the descriptions of the tsunami that survive until today, this
incident is the one that seems to go on for
the longest. Most likely, the boat was really struck twice,

(08:04):
once by the incoming water, which kept it from entering
the mouth of the river, and then it was struck
a second time by the rebound of that water off
of the land and the currents from the mouth of
the river, And so that second wave is what drove
the boat onto the rocks. The headman in Miho, a
population three hundred, the same one who had wondered whether
the strange seas were a tsunami, evacuated the village's elderly

(08:27):
residents and its children to a shrine on high ground.
He described the unusual seas as a series of seven
unusually large waves. Because Miho was relatively sheltered, the crest
of the tsunami there was probably smaller than in Miaco Bay,
where the shape of the land funneled the waters The
city of Tanabe is on the southern end of the

(08:48):
recorded journey of the tsunami's path. Tanabe was much larger
and had a population of about twenty six hundred, including
the mayor for the whole district. There, the tsunami flooded
a government's storehouse, castle moat, and it flooded farmland around
the bay. This stretch of Japanese coastline covers nearly one
thousand kilometers. It's about six hundred and twenty one miles

(09:10):
at various points along that span. The crest of the
tsunami seems to have ranged from two to five meters
or six and a half to sixteen feet, So it
was definitely enough to cause damage and alarm, but it
was a smaller influx of water than say the flood
from a typhoon or a very powerful storm surge. Yeah.
So this, although it was damaging and there was some

(09:32):
loss of life, this is one of those things that
by comparison, like a really bad storm, could have had
a similar or worse effect on the island. This is
also much much smaller than, for example, the tsunami that
was spawned by the March eleventh, twenty eleven earthquake that
reached heights of up to forty meters or one hundred
and thirty one feet, and that was smaller than the

(09:54):
tsunami that was spawned by this same earthquake when it
struck North America's Pacific northwest, which is what we going
to talk about after a brief word from a sponsor.

(10:15):
Unlike in Japan, where a government that was really into
record keeping combined with a population that was highly literate
to give us lots and lots of written records of
the tsunami, in northwestern North America, histories were being kept
at this point through oral tradition. In seventeen hundred, the
Cascadia region, which encompasses what's now northern California all the

(10:36):
way north to Alaska, was home to four distinct cultural
language groups, the Coast Salish, the Wakashian, the Shinookan, and
the Sahaptan. These encompassed a dozen distinct languages and many
many more distinct tribes and bands, all of them with
their own traditions and customs and cultures and stories. Earthquake happened,

(11:01):
this part of North America had not yet experienced sustained
contact with Europeans. It would be another seventy plus years
before Bruno Jsseta would land in what's now Washington State,
or Captain James Cook would explore Vancouver Island. Europeans started
colonizing the Pacific Northwest about a century later, and it
was another fifty years before European arrivals started writing down

(11:23):
that region's oral traditions. But in that roughly century and
a half between first contact and the effort to document
Native American and First Nations people's oral histories in Cascadia,
as many as ninety five percent of those distinct oral
traditions were lost. Warfare, European introduced diseases, loss of traditional

(11:44):
territory to European colonists, and cultural assimilation all played a
role in the loss of a whole lot of Cascadia's
unwritten history. However, it's clear from the symbolism in many
of the surviving Native stories that the Native people of Cascadia,
like the people of Japan, understood the connection between earthquakes

(12:04):
and floods. There are lots of references to earthquakes and
floods in their oral histories, their folklore, and stories throughout
the region. Stories about thunderbird battling with whale are common
among many Pacific Northwest peoples, likely drawn from the region's
seismic activity and the connection between shaking ground and rushing water.

(12:24):
In some of these stories, thunderbird sinks his talons into
whale's back as they're fighting, and whale drags thunderbird down
to the bottom of the ocean, and others thunderbird flies
into the sky with whale like holding whale and then
drops whale onto the ocean, causing a massive flood. The
mythology is a little bit different further to the south.

(12:46):
For instance, the Uruk tribe, who historically lived along the
southern part of Cascadia and along Klamath River and are
a federally recognized tribe in California today, has a story
about thunder and earthquake. I went to earthquake because the
people didn't have enough to eat, thinking that if the
planes became ocean, people could fish there. So earthquake ran

(13:08):
along the land, causing the land to sink and fill
with an ocean full of salmon, whales, and seals. In
addition to stories like these, themes of shaking and flooding
and an inner play between The two are also present
in masks, art, dance, and ceremonies among many of Cascadia's
native peoples. But apart from the more general tradition of folklore,

(13:32):
myths and legends, which of course are open to lots
of other interpretations as well, there are also specific stories
about specific earthquakes and tsunami that have been passed down
through generations. Modern researchers studying the connections between native oral
history and the region's seismic history have traced nine different
stories told to Europeans by native peoples between eighteen sixty

(13:55):
and nineteen sixty four that are detailed enough to determine
they probably stem from the seventeen hundred earthquake and tsunami.
They're stories that combined both flooding and shaking, and describe
family connections or other details that put the story into
that right time period. Three of them are the stories
of specific ancestors, grandparents or great grandparents who either saw

(14:19):
a survivor of the seventeen hundred earthquake or survived it themselves.
One of the most frequently cited was written down in
eighteen sixty four. A man known as Billy Blatch told
James Swan the story of a tsunami, which Swan recorded
in his diary on Tuesday, January twelfth of that year.
Swin wrote that Billy Blatch told him about water that

(14:40):
flowed and then receded and then rose again quote without
any swell or waves, and submerged the whole of the cape,
and in fact the whole country except the mountains. Billy
Blatch's story goes on to talk about people who drifted
away in their canoes, as well as canoes that came
down in the trees and were destroyed, and lives that
were lost. In nineteen twenty nine, a woman named Agnes Mattz,

(15:02):
who was a member of the Teloa tribe also known
as the Tiloa de nine nation, told cultural anthropologist Cora A.
Du Bois a story about a tidal wave in Oregon.
Quote there were no white people on earth when it happened,
she said, and went on to describe a story about
a grandmother warning her two grandchildren who she had raised,
to run to the top of a mountain as fast

(15:24):
as they could, and when they looked back, they saw
the water consume everything. With so little surviving oral history,
we can't reconstruct a point by point recounting of the
earthquake and tsunami in Cascadia the way we did in Japan.
But given how populated the coastal region from British Columbia
to northern California was and how many native peoples made

(15:46):
extensive use of the rivers and waterways to move inland
from the coast, the only logical conclusion is that it
was catastrophic. Even for those who felt the earthquake and
survived by moving to higher ground, the tsunami would have
destroyed homes. Can you fishing nets, stored food and everything
else that was necessary for survival. And we're going to
talk about how these two events on opposite sides of

(16:08):
the Pacific were finally connected. But first we're gonna pause
and have a loll sponsor break. Here is what we
know today. At nine pm local time on January twenty sixth,
seventeen hundred, the Cascadia subduction zone ruptured along its six

(16:33):
hundred and eighty mile or one thousand, ninety four kilometer length.
This fault system is off the coast of North America
and from northern California today all the way north into
British Columbia. Today, people living on the coast both felt
the quake and experienced the tsunami that followed. It only
would have taken about twenty minutes for the water displaced

(16:54):
toward the North American coast to actually reach it. Researchers
estimate that that struck was up to fifty feet or
fifteen meters high. Then about ten hours later, water displaced
in the opposite direction reached Japan, reaching heights of about
sixteen feet or five meters. This wave of water traveled

(17:16):
from northeast to southwest down the Japanese coast for the
next eight to ten hours. It took a really long
time for anyone to connect these two events together, even
after the efforts we talked about at the very beginning
of the show. And one big reason is that for
much of the twentieth century, geologists thought the faults in
this part of the world weren't really capable of producing

(17:38):
a very powerful earthquake. They would max out at around
magnitude seven, and that wouldn't necessarily be powerful enough to
spawn the tsunami that ultimately reached Japan. Yeah. Seven is
still pretty big earthquake, yeah, but not the size needed
to spawn this level of destruction. But throughout the nineteen eighties,

(17:59):
researchers basic trying to settle disputes about whether Cascadia was
capable of producing great earthquakes, started to find more and
more evidence that incredibly large earthquakes really had struck the
region in the past. Most of this research studied the
lay of the land in the Pacific Northwest and the
remains of forests. In an earthquake of this size and type,

(18:22):
land can suddenly drop, and when land on the coast
or otherwise near water drops, the water rushes in to
fill that void. So when a coastal forest suddenly drops,
the water that rushes in kills the trees and creates
a ghost forest. As researchers started looking for evidence of
whether Cascadia could spawn great earthquakes, they started finding these

(18:42):
sorts of ghost forests. And it wasn't as though these
ghost forests were a total surprise. Researchers had already found
plenty of submerged logs and stumps, along with the hearths
and other archaeological evidence of destroyed homes of native peoples.
But for a long time, the conventional wisdom was the
trees had been killed through a slow rise in sea levels,

(19:04):
not an earthquake in a sudden drop of the land,
but other bits of evidence started to point toward the
earthquake theory. There were layers of silt that could only
have come in along its tsunami, and entire marshes were
buried and preserved under layers of silt and sand that
could only have arrived there suddenly not part of a
gradual process. In nineteen ninety six, after more than a

(19:27):
decade of piecing together all this evidence, Japanese researchers first
connected the tsunami that struck the island of Honshu in
seventeen hundred with the earthquake that happened on the same
day in the Pacific Northwest. By that point, radiocarbon dating
had already pinpointed the date of the creation of these
ghost forests in Cascadia as sometime between sixteen ninety five

(19:48):
and seventeen twenty. In nineteen ninety seven, the date was
further refined that having happened sometime between August sixteen ninety
nine and May seventeen hundred, so between the end of
one grow both phase and the beginning of the next.
For these trees, what they did was they compared the
ghost trees' roots which they excavated for this purpose, to

(20:09):
the rings of neighboring trees that had survived since before
seventeen hundred. And you can read so much about the
science behind this earthquake and tsunami in the Orphan Tsunami
of seventeen hundred Japanese clues to a parent earthquake in
North America which was prepared by the US Geological Survey

(20:30):
in conjunction with the Geological Survey of Japan. And we
will have a link to that in the show notes. Yeah,
it's one of those books you can buy it and
find it in libraries, but it's also a public domain
piece because it was created by government sources that you
can read on the internet for free. Aside from solving
this mystery of what caused the Orphan tsunami, this research

(20:50):
is incredibly important to actual life today in the Pacific Northwest.
The idea that a magnitude nine earthquake is possible or
maybe even inevitable, has a huge impact into the conversation
around how resilient buildings and bridges and other structures need
to be to withstand the level of seismic activity. That's

(21:14):
possible in the region. Not to be alarming that a
lot of things built there were built before anyone figured
this out, that is for sure. Two of my siblings
live in the Pacific Northwest. I lived there when I
was a kid, and I know that they have I
don't know if they realize it's related to this specific
geological survey and research that was done, but they have

(21:38):
become suddenly aware of, like, oh, we've gotten some notices
about maybe looking at fortifications of our homes. Yeah, it was.
I can't if it was last year or the year before.
It was within the last couple of years. There was
a whole wave of articles about this whole thing, and
I'm not sure exactly what's spawned those articles because at
that point, I mean, this book about the seven teen

(22:00):
hundred earthquake and tsunami had been out for a while,
and it was one of those things that I read
and I thought about my brother and sister in law
at that point, I mean, they live they live in Seattle,
and at that point they were living in a condo
that was sort of under a highway bridge. And my

(22:20):
sister in law had said to me when I came
to visit them. She was like, when the big one happens,
that's going to fall on us. And so I remember
reading all these articles and being like, you guys got
to go now, you need to go now. So yeah,
that's it's it's now building standards are taking into account
the idea that, yes, the magnitude seven is not the

(22:42):
upper limit. Here magnitude nine plus is. Thanks so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course
of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current

(23:02):
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(23:23):
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