Show thirty thousand humans perish WHOLE the entire group badly shaken up A seismic wave which recently was visited upon the coast of japan causes devastation and brings almost incalculable damage and an enormous loss of life the list of dead cannot be made out and the number of killed and injured will reach francisco july 13 the tokio correspondent ol 01 the united press writing under date 0 july thus graphically described de ano devastation wrought by the seismic wave which recently visited the coast of japan japan has been visited by a calamity of almost unprecedented magnitude on the of june at in the evening a seismic wave struck the northeast coast of the main island throughout a distance of about miles and in five minutes people were killed and houses destroyed anyone can identity the location of the disaster by a glance at the map of japan from the island of kinswa ban on the south N lat E lone to on the north N lat E long the coast of and which assumes a distinctly convex shape nearly every town and every in vicinity was visited by this wave the portion near hamadi buffered most ee verely the general direction of the wave appears to have been north by east and after carrying devastation to the shore of the main island it touched the entire croup of islands in the case of a seismic wave one stupendous blow accomplished the whole calamity in an instant at half past echt the inhabitants of numerous towns and halleta along the coast were celebrating the boys festival on the i filth day of the fifth month according to the old calendar at 25 minutes before of them bad been swept out to kt a or thrown dead upon the shore and of their homes disappeared or lay wrecked there was nothing to presage the disaster from 11 in the forenoon until in the afternoon heavy rain fell it waa followed by a fine evening and after dark calm there ie much difficulty in obtaining perfectly accurate statements as to times of phenomena that preceded the final catastrophe cata they were too insignificant to beem worth record several accounts agree however that at about three or four shocks of earthquake were felt not violent shock that the people have learned to dread the barometer gave no indication of anything unusual some twenty or twenty five minutes later a booming boand became audible from the din of the sea it appears to have been variously interpreted some construed it aa the noise of a coming galo others supposed that a huge wave had reached the offing and others thought it was a school of whales others deemed to realize the real nature of the loiso and ried into the interior rapidly tb enoise inere aeed until it assumed the volume and deafening din of a great park of artillery and then wave from twenty to thirty feet high were thundering against the shore the places where the actual totals of deaths reached the highest figures were not always those that suffered most in proportion to their population of the three prefectures visited by the wave iwate and almori iwate had by far the largest aggregate of disasters dis astere its list of dead amounting to some of the details however convey a more graphic idea of the facts than any general statement can suc gest hamaishi Kam aishi is a little scheide abed at tho bead of a rocky inlet two miles deep and directly facing the ocean behind it is a precipitous bill the inhabitants seem to have remained until the last wholly unconscious of what was pending at a little after 8 a mountain of sea was observed piling itself up at tte mouth of the inlet and in a moment with a thunderous roar waves thirty feet high swept over the town three times these avalanches of water rushed the first incomparably tho most terrible and in lees than two minutes the town was virtually annihilated out of 1223 dwellings only remained standing standi cg and out of a population of death had overtaken and lay wounded in completeness eness of destruction this record heads the list scarcely loss appalling was the work of the wave in a bay some five miles farther north there in the village of only persons escaped death out of a population of and only two houses out of as many hundred remained standing at varna di houses out of were destroyed and persons were killed out of at toni houses were swept away out of and 1103 persons were killed and 82 wounded out of a total of 1200 in the kissen district one town and town and eleven villages attacked by the wave had persons killed and 1560 houses washed away or wrecked the whole hamlet of houses vaa annihilated and the eola survivors were a party of men that happened to be playing go in a temple situated on high ground such are the tales of death and ruin that come from place after place the terrible totals at this moment of writing being killed wounded and hoists washed away or wrecked in the prefecture of iwato where 36 towns and villages on the coast visited by the wave persons were killed and wounded out of a total of so that out of every three inhabitants ono was killed or wounded it is difficult yet to say whether males or females preponderate among the victims statistics from prefecture show that out of 1376 deaths in 20 were malee and females on the other hand a traveller through tho two hamlets of bannoura Tan noura and funakoshi the day after the catastrophe baw only forty men there not a living woman or a child was visible on the road ho within a distance of some yards he counted corpes of women and children to the number of 32 there were some remarkable escapee men out to from one side of a bay were thrown up alive on the opposite beach in one case several per were Je posited on an island nearly three miles from whence the wave had torn them A few saved their lives by dinting to baulks of timber and several getting wedged among the wooden debris of wrecked build inga were preserved until the wave receded at at inn in oura a traveler apparently tho only man in the only man in the house was graepel by four terrified women and the combined weight of the five furnished a steady point but such bright incidents were rare whereas of inexpressibly pres sibly sad there are numbers the parents of six children caused the little oceo to throw their arms around the beams of the house there they dune the water reaching up to their shoulders the smallest child losing its bold was swept away and its father springing after it shared its fate presently the mother trying to fend off some floating debris that threatened to strike the children waa carried off and the five orphans alone remained in another family of ten one child of eight drifted to a rock and was saved and in another family of the same number the father having carried a baby to a hill and found that none of the others followed beet down the baby and ran back only to perish with the reel the story of a retired soldier is worth repeating 1 hie experiences in the recent war bad taught him to apprehend the raiding of the japanese coasts by a hostile fleet tims when the cannon like roar of the advancing water and the cries of the people reached him he threw off his tunic and ran abord in hand next morning his corpse was found much battered ut not separated from the sword St to say fishermen plying their trade four miles from the coast did not observe any thing to in dicato ane occurrence of a serious phenomenon no menon though a party only three miles out in the same district encountered breakers rolling from the north by and by one of the boats observed what seemed to be a large fish floating on the water but on rowing nearer they saw that it was a child lying on mat in the lame manner three other children were picked up by a fisherman who to his found that one of them was his awu eon inexpressibly pres sibly sad was the case of some fishermen who returning shoreward after the catastrophe received rece ired their first notice of what had occurred by finding the corpses of their wives and children floating in the water at points closer to the center of the disturbance however the commotion in the water was precept ible to a much greater distance from the shore thus a party of fishermen that were out looking for tunny off the Sh izukawa coast beard as they supposed the booming of big guns in the distance soon afterwards looking seaward they saw the surface of the ocean heave in huge masses which after rising to mountainous heights broke in the middle and swept norih ward and southward ultimately striking the shore with a deafening crash the waves passed under the boats without swamping them bu the water in the vicinity of the shore remained so rough throughout the night that the fishermen could not make a landing until morning when they found their wives and children dead and their homes ia ruins the acene presented by the devastated districts h along the beach the timber of wrecked houses lie piled upon each other moss covered roofs of thatch that sheltered happy families a few days ago in quiet country nooks are strewn pell mell on the sands here houses that have had their walls torn away stand mera skeletons there others have been wrenched from their foundations telescoped into each other tumbled upside down or heaped er in shattered confusion in one instance the immense mass of water rushing up a narrow inlet tore from their foundations the house on either side and drove them with terrific force into the highland where they now lie crushed into a confused mass of timber and wreckage of all kinds the grave ot many a mangled body horses and cattle lie wedged amona the rocks and men and women wander about and helpless invoking as though their minds and energies had been numbed numerous corpses are still buried under the debris of ruined buildings or under heaps of mud and sand thrown up by the waves acl often when a body is disinterred no friend or relative remains alive 19 identify the government ie taking extreme measures of relief and liberal subscriptions are pouring into the newspaper offices both vernacular and for when calamity overtakes japanese the benevolence of the foreign community ie invariably h highhanded ae to the immediate cause of the disaster opinions are baill divided at first it was sup that the had its origin in a sudden collapse of the sides of the subterranean crater known as the Tuscarora deep commander now rear admiral belknap of the united states navy on a deeo bea survey cruise in the united states frigate tuscarora corora 22 beare W found a trough like depris eion off the northeast coast of japan in in north latitude lati tuda and east lonati tude the heavy sounding lead took about 1 boure to reach bottom and indicated a depth of over aad a halt statute miles on the other band considering that the advent of the great wave wae immediately preceded by earthquake bocks whose vertical character precludes the hypothesis that they were due to the stupendous rolli neof the wave the most reasonable conclusion appears to be that a submarine volcanic eruption took place somewhere within the area of the ocean bounded by the and meridians of east longitude and the end parallels of north latitude jt may be stated here that rince the calamity the fish beem to have deserted the upper waters a few can be caught now only by using the deepest heince the great bulk having apparently gone down to inaccessible depths A shocking feature of the phenomena was its savage energy of destruction in between Band aisan mens bodice when not torn limb from limb were battered out of all huahn shape no wonder that euch was tho case tor 80 stupendous was the atmospheric disturbance tur bance that it not only leveled forests but aleo stripped the trees oi bark and taige reducing them to blanched skeletons and now in the case of the iwate wave corpses recovered within a few hours of death looked though they had undergone n weeks decomposition the wounds suffered by the survivors and shown by tho bodies of the dead are also of a shock shocking description in some cases the flesh is torn into exposing the benes beneath in others the eyes are forced out of sockets in tho beem to have been wrenched asunder by forces acting in opposite directions ions in others the skin looks as though it had been plunged in bailing water and almost every corpse shows purple spots as if it had been fiercely pelted fragments of stone or iron it is expected that ivr 30 per cent of the survivors now receiving aid will succumb the number of deaths will then probably exceed |