The few, seemingly miraculous, stories of survival are passed on from person to person, and some are given as much media coverage as the horrific devastation. The rescue of a 60-year-old man from the roof of his house, washed 15 km out to sea; the survival of a 4-month-old girl who was swept away from her family but later reunited with them; the safe birth of a baby by flashlight, in the cold, in a hospital with no power. These are stories we can understand, gain a morsel of sustenance from. The stories of the giant waves, the thousands of deaths, the bodies: these are too big to comprehend.

Sixteen years ago, the last time Japan was struck by a really big quake, it was very different. When the magnitude 6.8 Great Hanshin Earthquake hit Hyogo Prefecture at 5:46 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1995, more than 6,000 people died, mainly in built-up areas, and especially in the city of Kobe.

That quake, originating 16 km underground and 20 km from Kobe, caused some ¥10 trillion of damage, amounting to 2.5 percent of Japan's Gross Domestic Product. It was a type of tremor known as an inland shallow earthquake, which was caused by east-west movement along the Nojima fault in the vicinity of Awaji-shima in the eastern part of the Seto Inland Sea, whose largest island it is. On that occasion it was the shallowness of the event, rather than its brute seismic force, that exposed buildings to large amounts of energy and led to such serious damage.