THE MIYAKO TSUNAMI: A City Swallowed by the Sea in Minutes | Full Documentary

#Documentary #Fukushima #Japan Friday, March 11, 2011. 2:46 p.m. Three hundred kilometers east of Miyako’s coast, deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, two tectonic plates that had been locked against each other for more than a thousand years finally rupture. In three minutes, a section of Earth’s crust the size of Greece shifts fifty meters. It is the fourth-largest earthquake ever recorded by seismographs—a magnitude 9.1. Thirty minutes later, the sea reaches Miyako. Not as an ordinary wave, but as a wall of dark water more than 20 meters high, thick with boats, cars, and entire houses swept up inside it. In the Taro district, the massive 10-meter concrete seawall—proudly called the Great Wall of Japan and considered impenetrable since the 1970s—is swallowed in seconds, as if it were nothing more than a chalk line. In that district, 181 people die. Across the city, 517. And along Japan’s entire northeastern coast, nearly 22,000. But Miyako’s most remarkable story is not about the destruction. It is about a small village called Aneyoshi, perched on a hillside above the city. There, beside a path, a century-old stone carved in 1896 by survivors of the Meiji-Sanriku earthquake bears a single warning in Japanese characters: DO NOT BUILD HOMES BELOW THIS POINT. One hundred and fifteen years later, all 11 families who honored the stone’s warning survived. Everyone who ignored it and built below it died. In this documentary, you will discover exactly what caused the floor of the Pacific Ocean to rupture that day; why Miyako had already been wiped off the map in 1896 and rebuilt in the same place for three consecutive generations; what the Japanese did to protect themselves and why those defenses were not enough; the story of ancestral warnings carved in stone, heeded by a few and ignored by most; the moment the tsunami reached a maximum height of 40.5 meters; and why, to this day, this disaster remains nature’s greatest lesson in humility for the world’s most disaster-prepared nation. 📚 MAIN SOURCES — Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) — Official report on the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake, March 11, 2011. — Mori, Nobuhito; Takahashi, Tomoyuki; Yasuda, Tomohiro; Yanagisawa, Hideaki. Nationwide field survey of the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake tsunami. Coastal Engineering Journal. — Suppasri, Anawat; Shuto, Nobuo; Imamura, Fumihiko; Koshimura, Shunichi; Mas, Erick; Yalciner, Ahmet Cevdet. Lessons Learned from the 2011 Great East Japan Tsunami. Pure and Applied Geophysics. — Tohoku University — International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) — 3.11 digital archive. — USGS — M9.1 Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan, technical summary. — Kingston, Jeff. Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11. Routledge. — Iwate Prefectural Government — Official casualty report by municipality, including Miyako City and the Taro district. — Okada, Norio; Ye, Tao; Kajitani, Yoshio; Shi, Peijun. The 2011 Eastern Japan Great Earthquake Disaster: Overview and Comments. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science. — Yamamura, Etsuo. Tsunami stones and folk memory: ethnographic research on ancestral warning stones along the Sanriku coast (Aneyoshi, Kesennuma, Ryoishi). — Miyako City Great East Japan Earthquake Memorial Museum (Taro) — Eyewitness testimony and photographic archives. — NHK — Audiovisual archives from Japan’s public broadcaster, including live broadcasts from March 11, 2011. #Miyako #Tsunami2011 #Tohoku #Japan #Sanriku #JapanEarthquake #NaturalDisasters #Fukushima #Iwate #Documentary #JapaneseHistory #GreatWallOfTaro #TsunamiStones #TrueStories