Hi All. While living in Japan there were many occasions where I would see information at the top of the TV screen about an earthquake that had just occurred. The magnitude of the earthquake would be given for the different locations that felt the quake.

On the day of the Hokkaido quake I was watching the NHK TV in Hollister when I heard the ding, ding alerting you to special bulletin. About that time the program switched to the NHK studios in Hokkaido where it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know they were having a strong quake. Within a couple of minutes I could see a lot M>6.0+ along the eastern coast of Hokkaido with a large number of M>5.0+ occurring further inland and on the northern part of Honshu. A couple of minutes later the epicenter of the quake was located.

There is a report coming out of Japan that there was a 12-foot tsunami. No one saw it, but debris was found in trees that indicated a 12-foot wave had struck the area.

For the most part the Japanese do not use the Richter scale for measuring quakes in their country. They have the Richter scale, but this is used for quakes not felt in Japan.

The Japanese "shindo" scale for measuring earthquakes is more commonly used in Japan. Shindo refers to the intensity of an earthquake at a given location, i.e. what people actually feel at a given location, while the Richter scale measures the magnitude of an earthquake, i.e. the energy that an earthquake releases at the epicenter.

The shindo scale ranges from shindo one, a slight earthquake felt only by people who are not moving, to shindo seven, a severe earthquake. Shindo two and three are still minor earthquakes that do not cause damage, while objects start to fall at shindo four, and heavier damage occurs at shindo five and higher.

I watched a special tonight that the better half had taped for me Saturday. It was about the next Kanto Plains quake that will strike Tokyo. It won’t be pretty. You can take what you saw for the Kobe quake and multiply that about 20 times. Tokyo is built on sedimentary soil so any shaking there will be amplified much in the same way a quake near Mexico City does. Most of the damage done to Mexico City is caused by quakes that occur near the west coast of Mexico. That is quite a distance from Mexico City. As a matter of fact it has been shown that at times there is more damage at Mexico City then at the epicenter of the quake. Take Care…Don in creepy town