This history of Japanese earthquake prediction provides a compelling account of how disaster policies are made and unmade. It offers interesting insights into Japan’s post-war development and its relationship with the world.

Kerry Smith, Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Brown University, describes his book Predicting Disasters as “a history of scientists’ efforts to reduce the uncertainty around the timing and location of powerful earthquakes in modern Japan.” Reducing uncertainty, in Smith’s sense, is not just about understanding seismology. It also implies some way to translate the science into statements that are useful for policymakers and the public.

So, Predicting Disasters is not a history of earthquake science or monitoring technology. Instead, it explores how Japan developed a combination of science, technology, and policy that allowed an obscure committee of scientists to influence all levels of Japanese society by issuing public warnings about earthquakes (and occasionally make international headlines in the process).

Scientists and policymakers use different types of statements to communicate information about hazards like earthquakes. Short-term predictions are warnings about reasonably specific events, normally expected to happen soon. They are useful because they allow people to take targeted action, such as evacuating threatened areas or pre-deploying equipment. By contrast, forecasting involves making statements about the probabilities of events that could occur in the future (typically over a long period). Successful forecasting allows people to make informed decisions about land use and how much to invest in risk reduction.

Predicting Disasters considers both short-term prediction and forecasting. The boundary between them is not always obvious, and the term “prediction” can be used for both, which is a rare source of potential confusion in an otherwise precise book.

Smith traces the fortunes of prediction from 1905 to 2011. Over the twentieth century it developed from a quixotic idea supported by individual scientists to a dominant preoccupation of Japanese seismology. In the process, predictions influence spread well beyond the universities, helping to transform the relationship between earthquakes and Japanese society. This process reached its apotheosis in 1978 when the Japanese Diet voted to approve the Large-Scale Earthquake Countermeasures Act (the Daishinhō). The Daishinhō defined new powers and responsibilities to be used immediately before an earthquake, enshrining short-term earthquake prediction in Japanese emergency management policy.

The problem is that prediction never really worked. As Smith bluntly notes, “[as] of 2023, there had been no successful examples of short-term earthquake prediction of the kind researchers in Japan had been pursuing since the 1960s…[and] the earthquakes anticipated for Tokyo and the Tōkai district had not occurred, but others that the public had not been warned about had, at great costs.” Reliable warning signs (“precursors”) proved elusive despite a growing and increasingly sophisticated monitoring network, while scientific advances did more to complicate the understanding of earthquakes than to point the way to effective predictive models.

Enthusiasm for the prediction project was eroded by a series of poorly predicted disasters, including the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji and the 2011 Great East Japan earthquakes. By 2020, surveys of scientists and the public alike revealed widespread scepticism, especially about short-term prediction.

Smith’s narrative is dynamic, which is no small achievement because the proceedings of scientific conferences and government committees provide much of its raw material. Earthquakes themselves make frequent appearances (often with the effect of reinvigorating a flagging funding or policy proposal), but they are never the focus.

Rather than taking a thematic approach, the book is a conventional chronological account. This was a wise choice because it allows Smith to wander freely from his narrow remit to explore interesting tangents without sacrificing coherence. The result is a book that delivers more than it promises. For example, since earthquakes are so important to the Japanese experience of disaster, the book also works as an accessible history of emergency management policy in Japan.

Another theme traces the international aspects of the Japanese earthquake prediction project. Smith notes that the search “for reliable forms of earthquake forecasting and prediction was never confined to a single country. Governments devoted resources and scientists their expertise to prediction research in China, Greece, the United States, the USSR and elsewhere at different points throughout the twentieth century.”

The United States looms large. During the post-war Occupation American influence was direct and exerted from a position of political and economic superiority. However, Smith shows that Japanese scientists were never junior partners receiving superior American expertise, nor were they passive in the face of change imposed upon them. Smith describes an American bureaucracy that recognised the potential of Japanese earthquake science and was prepared to support, in principle if not financially, a Japanese vision for the future of prediction research.

After the Occupation, as Japan’s economy recovered and boomed, and its scientific capability expanded accordingly, the two countries settled into a complicated relationship—often collaborative and sometimes competitive. Smith explores the complexities of this partnership, which is scientific, cultural, and political. Optimism about prediction in Japan in the 1970s was mirrored in the United States and other places (notably China). In addition to scientific exchanges between the two countries, earthquakes occurring in the United States themselves contributed to developments in Japan. For example, Smith describes how the San Fernando Valley Quake that affected Los Angeles in 1971 influenced thinking in Japan about how to manage Tokyo’s earthquake risk.

By 2010, the two countries’ approaches had drifted apart. Where short-term prediction remained embedded in Japanese emergency management arrangements, the American position had been sceptical since the late 1990s.

This illustrates what may be the most compelling conclusion of the book. Smith makes a valuable contribution to the literature that illuminates how countries facing similar hazards with access to the same technology and knowledge can nonetheless find themselves managing disasters in radically different ways. The story of earthquake predication in Japan offers a reminder that the practice of emergency management and disaster risk reduction is inseparable from questions of culture and history, and that effectively protecting communities from disaster will never simply be a matter of copying “best practice” from somewhere else.

This is a review of Kerry Smith’s Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists and Uncertainty in Modern Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). ISBN: 9781512825374

Christopher Heard is a disaster risk reduction and emergency management policy expert, with a particular interest in disaster risk finance and governance. He studied economics at Northwestern University and the University of Queensland and is based in Hobart, Tasmania.

This review article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.