地震！！

Unless you've been in a coma for the past couple days, you will have heard something about Japan and the recent big ass earthquake. Japan has earthquakes all the time, but obviously something of this magnitude is not common.

The Tokyo area typically gets about 2 earthquakes a month, but they do little more that rattle the cups in your cabinets. Most earthquakes in Japan won't even wake you up if you were sleeping. The Osaka area gets a few quakes too, the most famous being the Kobe earthquake in 1995.

A lot of people don't realize this but the cities are extremely safe from earthquakes. Skyscrapers are built with extreme care and many people go to Japan to study how to design buildings that can resist earthquakes. Residential areas are another story. Japanese homes tend to be made of little more than wood and paper. Seriously, there is little resale value in homes in Japan. It is ofter cheaper to demolish a home and rebuild rather than renovate. This is part of the reason that a Tsunami in a rural area is so destructive.

The few weeks leading up to the earthquake, you may or may not have heard of the volcano that was erupting in southern Japan. Japan is a disaster prone country. Typhoon (台風), Tsunami (津波), earthquakes (地震) are no strangers to Japan...but I'll take it over America any day.