This Disaster Simulator Prepares Tokyoites for the Next Big Earthquake

I'm being rocked violently by a magnitude nine earthquake along with three other people. We've all ducked underneath a table and, squished together, we shield our heads with cushions. As the shaking intensifies, we clutch at the table legs to stop our bodies from sliding out. After a minute, the tremors subside and we crawl out from under our table shelter looking dazed.

The tremors we just experienced were similar to those that ravaged Tohoku, a northern province in Japan, in March 2011. But our earthquake experience wasn't exactly real. The shaking was computer-simulated, triggered by the flick of a switch by our disaster guide, Yoshiko Miyagawa. We were inside one of Tokyo's three Safety and Disaster Learning Centers (Bousaikan), run by the Fire Department in Ikebukuro, learning how to prepare for the worst.

"We don't want to just show people visuals of what a big earthquake is like, we really want people to experience a high-magnitude tremor so they know what to expect," Makoto Goto, a representative of the Ikebukuro Bosaikan, told me. "We really want people to gain the basic safety skills so they can protect themselves in the event of disaster."

Japan lies in what's dubbed the "Ring of Fire"—a 40,000 km horseshoe-shaped basin made up of a medley of fault lines, oceanic trenches, volcanic belts and arcs. This leaves the country susceptible to natural disasters. It's hit by as many as 100,000 earthquakes per year, and nobody knows when the next big quake will strike.

In April 2012, the Tokyo metropolitan government predicted what would happen to Tokyo if it were hit by a magnitude-7.3 earthquake. They foresaw epic transportation delays, and estimated close to 9,700 deaths—with up to 4,100 caused by wooden houses in the city going up in flames. The Lloyds City Risk Index Report for 2015 to 2025, released in August 2015, suggests that Japan's proneness to both manmade and natural disasters makes Tokyo the second riskiest city in the world to live in.

The earthquake simulator, which is basically a moveable stage equipped with a table and five chairs, might sound like something you'd come across in an amusement park. However, at the Ikebukuro Bosaikan—which was established in 1986 and is manned by a crew of retired firefighters—the small simulator allows people who've never experienced an earthquake an insight into how terrifying they can be. The disaster guide also takes visitors through what you're supposed to do when the tremors strike so they're prepared if ever they come across the real thing. Miyagawa instructed us to quickly duck under the table as soon as we felt shaking and to avoid screaming in case we bit down on our tongues by accident.

The Ikebukuro Bousaikan offers the general public a physical experience of a fake quake, but they're by no means the only ones simulating an earthquake's deadly effects.

While the Bousaikan is all about instructing the public, researchers at the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) simulate earthquakes on a macro cityscape scale in order to inform disaster response at a national level.

They hope that their simulations can assist government decision makers when it comes to preparing city infrastructures against powerful earthquakes in the future. According to Lalith Wijerathne—an associate professor who virtually simulates hypothetical disaster evacuation scenarios in urban environments in the event of a deadly quake—they can't say when a big quake will strike, but "it's coming."

"In our center we want to simulate earthquake phenomena from start to finish," Wijerathne told me. "We want to develop software so we can simulate the effect of an earthquake on a large city, starting with the earthquake motion in the bedrock, then the shaking in the soil, and how this amplification process shakes buildings, and then how people start evacuating."

The researchers can apply data from past quakes and use the high processing power of Japan's K supercomputer in the RIKEN Advanced Institute of Computational Science in southern Japan to simulate its effects on their high-res cityscape visualizations. One of their sims takes a small segment of Tokyo, and shows roughly 300,000 virtual buildings of today being shaken by the equivalent of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. In a nutshell, the simulation platform offers the researchers a space where they can shake Tokyo in many different magnitudes and tremor styles.

"Instead of waiting for nature to do the experiment, we can do the experiment in the computer ourselves and observe how the buildings respond, or what damage could be caused," explained Wijerathne. On the simulation, the buildings that show up as red are the ones that are more susceptible to damage in the event of a big earthquake.

Currently, private building data is unavailable, so in order to simulate their shaking cityscape, the researchers gather building data from Google Earth and refer to Japanese design codes to suss out what kind of beam and column sizes each building might use.

Wijerathne admitted that their simulations would be more accurate with concrete building data, but foresaw that it would take some time before that became available.

Mega tremors like the one that hit Tohoku on 11 March 2011 are rare yet deadly occurrences. As the threat of a powerful earthquake looms, efforts are being made at both the civic and national level to inform disaster responses. Earthquake simulations over at ERI may provide government players with more effective disaster management strategies, while over at the Bousaikan, the disaster response instruction is on a more personal level.

Inside the Bousaikan, which was decked out in sparkling Christmas decorations at the time of my visit, Goto posed for a photograph beside the center's mascot, a cheerful blue elephant. A video of dancing firefighters and young women demonstrating disaster response techniques played on a screen just behind him.

"Some people in Japan have never experienced a big earthquake before, so they're surprised when they try out the simulator," remarked Goto. "Once you've experienced it, and have been trained how to react, your body will remember what to do when a real earthquake strikes."

Cool Japan is a column about the quirky and serious happenings in the Japanese scientific, technological and cultural realms. It covers the unknown, the mainstream, and the otherwise interesting developments in Japan.