"The pillars of the house made groaning sounds and began to crack. An earthquake! The wall clock stopped, and the electric fan went flying." That was how Hisamatsu Yamato, then an 18-year-old living in Tokyo's Honjo district, recalled the moment.
The event that would forever scar Yamato's memories occurred at 11:58 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 1, 1923, when a section of the Philippine Sea plate under the Kanto region abruptly shifted.
Seated at his desk at that same moment, University of Tokyo seismology professor Akitsune Imamura studiously observed that the tremors increased in intensity for about 12 seconds, followed by some five seconds of fierce shaking. The quake measured 7.9 on the open-ended Richter scale. Three minutes later, there was a second temblor, measuring 7.2; a third, 41/2 minutes later, measured 7.3. That day hundreds of aftershocks were recorded, 19 of them with magnitudes of 5 or higher.