Apocalyptic Imagination after 2011

Abstract

At 2:46 pm on March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake struck the western Pacific Ocean at a depth of thirty-two kilometers. Its epicenter was approximately seventy-two kilometers east of the Oshika Peninsula of Tōhoku, Japan. The quake lasted approximately six minutes, and caused a sequence of major tsunamis which hit the Pacific coastline of Japan’s northern islands and resulted in the loss of thousands of lives and devastation—even complete elimination—of many towns along the coast. Waves reached heights of up to 40.5 meters in Miyako City in Tōhoku’s Iwate Prefecture, and in the Sendai area traveled up to ten kilometers inland. The earthquake and tsunami caused an estimated 15,881 deaths, and 2,668 people remained unaccounted for as of March 2013. Over four hundred thousand people evacuated just after the quake; over 280 of them died from exposure, starvation, lack of sanitation, and lack of medical care.