"THE ORPHAN TSUNAMI OF 1700"
Unusual
seas ran ashore in Japan one winter's night in the year 1700.
People wrote of the effects: flooded fields, wrecked houses, a
fire, a
shipwreck, evacuation, fright. Having felt no earthquake
beforehand, some
of the writers called the flooding a "high tide" and most resisted
calling
it a tsunami. None could have known that a seismic shift on a
North
American fault had set off a train of trans-Pacific waves.