It began far out at sea, in a little-watched segment of a fault off Sendai, Japan. It reached land first as sound, the bass drum roll of heaven, amped up so that hundreds of miles away the sound blotted everything else out, pushed against ribs, even before the earth beneath began to shake. Later measurements showed the earthquake moved the entire island of Honshu eight feet closer to the United States and released energy equivalent to the explosion of nearly 500 megatons of TNT, roughly the same as letting off a tenth of the world's nuclear weapons at once.
The sound was not perceptible as far away as Tokyo, 300 kilometres to the south, but the vibrations were: buildings shook, some lost tiles and sheathing, there was damage at Tokyo Disneyland, in Chiba prefecture, and every earthquake detector in the Kanto area, which encompasses seven prefectures, registered the seismic waves.
It was 2.46pm on Friday, March 11, two hours before most office workers would normally head home. On the transport system were shoppers, children returning from school, tourists and others who did not have to be at a desk. With the confirmed detection of a major earthquake (the exact magnitude was, at first, underestimated), trains were halted mid-journey.
The United Nations Secretariat for International Strategy for Disaster Reduction called the near-total collapse of infrastructure (electricity, telecommunications, transport and water systems) caused by the quake 'synchronous failure'. The idea of such a failure in a highly modern, hard-wired society may seem counter-intuitive. We are used to being told that modern technological society is more adaptable and better able to cope with the unexpected. The internet, after all, was partly designed to serve as a series of redundant nodes in the event of a nuclear attack.
Of all places, Tokyo, with its huge LED displays and intersections that, even at night, are bright as a summer noon, has so often served as a showroom of technology: here is how the future will look and how it will work. But the earthquake kicked over the city as easily as Godzilla wreaked havoc on its cardboard incarnations in old movies. Those modern pieces of infrastructure, all wired together like nerve endings, failed: they failed individually, they failed in groups, and they left a large metropolitan area without much of its transport lifeline.
Tokyo itself was not left entirely without electricity, but the places outside the capital that did lose their power supply did not simply lose lighting. Homes and offices with internet phones (an increasingly popular option) lost communications as servers went dead. Laptops with batteries, and certain wireless connections, fared better initially, but in many places the power was off for far longer than the life of the average mobile phone or laptop battery.
The mobile phone network (Japan has a 96.8 per cent mobile penetration) collapsed partly because of the inability of the system to cope with the number of calls and partly because of the loss of power, which left many mobile base stations with nothing but a standby battery. Reports verify that social media platforms such as Skype and Twitter, and some phone system e-mails, running on discrete systems, kept working, and were used for emergency communication, but the near collapse of the public communications grid added to the immedi- ate problems faced within the Tokyo metropolitan area.