Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued

I agree the parent will likely be fine, but it can be stressful in the aftermath of a large quake. And if they want to leave the area and have the opportunity to do so calmly and safely, I think that’s justified.

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-a-fore...

- make sure nothing can fall on you when you're in bed (no mounted artwork above the headboard; no lamps etc on side tables that are high enough to fall on you)

- make sure you have footwear in your bedroom, so you can be mobile if there's broken glass everywhere

- store extra drinking water somewhere (I used a 6-gallon carboy that I periodically refilled)

Probably there are other good things to do, but all those made a lot of sense to me. Most of us spend more time in bed than in any other fixed location, so making sure the bed is a safe place rings true. And water is life.

On the other hand, if a shock doesn’t release all energy it may come to rest in a relatively weak spot that will soon give away again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_swarm: “The Matsushiro swarm lasted from 1965 to 1967 and generated about 1 million earthquakes. This swarm had the peculiarity of being sited just under a seismological observatory installed in 1947 in a decommissioned military tunnel. It began in August 1965 with three earthquakes too weak to be felt, but three months later, a hundred earthquakes could be felt daily. On 17 April 1966, the observatory counted 6,780 earthquakes, with 585 of them having a magnitude great enough to be felt, which means that an earthquake could be felt, on average, every two and a half minutes.”)

Because of that, I think an earthquake will increase the probability of one occurring again soon, but decrease its strength.

New Zealand’s 5th most deadly disaster was Christchurch’s 6.2 which killed 185 people. It was a shallow aftershock from a larger, less destructive quake.

The damage was huge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake

So the only thing we can say for sure is that it is still extremely difficult to predict earthquakes.

What is a typical maximum wave height during hurricane seasons in north of japan?

In Japan cables are (still) mostly overground. Use of underground is still a relatively new topic as addressed by the TEPCO website[1]. The first footer on the bottom of that page provides a nice TL;DR of the state of play:

     The plans for underground conversion have consisted of "Plan for Underground Conversion of Power Lines", which covered three terms from FY 1986 to FY 1998, followed by the "New Plan for Underground Conversion of Power Lines" from FY 1999 to FY 2003, and then the "Plan for the Removal of Utility Poles" from FY 2004 to FY 2008. Based on these plans, approximately 7,700 km of lines all across Japan were placed underground over 23 years by the end of FY 2008 (with TEPCO responsible for approximately 3,500 km).
     Currently, we are consulting with related personnel regarding items such as locations for conversion as based on the new "Guidelines for the Removal of Utility Poles" established in FY 2009.

We think the ground is familiar too. So watching it change into something else, a squirming alien beast, is a different kind of fear. It violates your assumptions about what is safe, about what is possible at all.

This character can clone himself hundreds times to help others, with art often mirroring the thousands of recovery workers seen in actual event footage.

My comment intended to link back the image of childhood heroes as corporeal selfless adults

The usage here by GP might just be because everyone looks/is-dressed the same and is working in unison, and since they're Japanese, anime comes to mind. In the show, Naruto often uses shadow clones to pull off more complex techniques, throwing himself, having them take turns punching/kicking, or in the case of the rasengan he divides the work of controlling the ball of chakra since he struggled to do it successfully by himself.

Same for me. If you don’t grow up with a number of small regular quakes or live in high-rise building that sways with the wind, it’s pretty unsettling to feel, what you always know as stable hard ground, solid buildings all of the sudden bouncing around. Rationally you know what it is and how it works but it’s still scary.

Edit: very, very quickly after the quake, which we felt, I might add. I got a notification via the 'Safety tips' app long after. I think I was on Airplane mode at the time.

This all happens in geologic slow motion, of course.

https://www.livescience.com/37418-subduction-zone-forming-of...