Founding father of Japanese seismology

“There are actually two satellites orbiting the Earth,” said Swiss physicist and Nobel Prize winner Charles Guillaume. “One of them we call the moon, and the other is Dr. Tanakadet.”

However, despite this extraordinary praise, Ikitsu Tanakadate, the father of Japanese seismology and aviation, is pathetic little known in his country and around the world.

When last month, on the night of February 13, the Tohoku region was struck by a 7.3-magnitude earthquake, a consequence of the Great East Japan Earthquake 10 years ago, I thought of Tanakadate. This aftershock was felt more strongly in Nineuhe, Iwate Prefecture – the birthplace of Tanakadit, which I visited a few years ago to learn more about the man who is arguably the greatest modern scientist in Japan.

Born in 1856, 12 years before the Meiji Restoration, he was sent as a child to the provincial capital Morioka to study English. Then, when he was 16 years old, his entire family moved to Tokyo to assist him in his educational endeavors.

Aiketsu Tanakadit went from his childhood in Iwate Prefecture to become a pioneer in Japan in seismology and aviation. | Courtesy of the Tanakadit Iketo Science Memorial Museum

His father wrote to him: “Japanese knowledge is in no way lagging behind the West in literature, politics and ethics, but when it comes to science and technology, we are far behind.

Tanakadit is enrolled in the science department of the University of Tokyo and is one of only three students in the first year of his class. After graduation, he studied there for two years before traveling to Europe. In January 1888, he enrolled at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, where he studied under the leadership of a scientific giant no less than mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin, before moving, two years later, to Berlin to work with Hermann von Helmholz, an innovator in the fields from physiology to Electrodynamics and Thermodynamics.

After he returned to Japan, he rushed to the site of the Mino-Awari earthquake in central Honshu at the end of October 1891. This, at that time, was the strongest internal earthquake ever recorded in Japan, killing more than 7,200 people. In his fieldwork, Tanakadati discovered why Newdani was wrong. The fault ruptured over 80 kilometers, causing it to rise six meters vertically and eight meters horizontally.

He continued his research in the region of the Great Rift that includes the boundary of the Itoyegawa-Shizuoka tectonic line, the Great Honshu Fault stretching from Niigata to Shizuoka.

Tanakadit, for the first time in the world, showed that earthquakes are associated with magnetic fields and urged the government to participate in seismic damage control.

More than a century later, on the tenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, these measures have progressed to the point where many people in the country – unfortunately not all of them – can stay safe in a powerful earthquake.

In 1899, Tanakadit was instrumental in establishing the International Latitude Observatory in Mizusawa, Iwate Prefecture, his birthplace, one of six similar places around the world to determine the extent and effects of the Earth’s axis movement, a phenomenon today believed to be associated with species extinction. All six observatories were located at the same latitude.

But his interests did not stop on the ground. He created hot air balloons that surveyed the skies over Port Arthur (present-day Dalian) in China, where one of the decisive battles of the Russo-Japanese War took place in the last five months of 1904.

In 1908, he built Japan’s first wind tunnel in his flying laboratory to test aircraft wings. In the same year, the first Japanese glider flew in the air over the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, Tokyo. He chose Tokorozawa, in Saitama Prefecture, as the location of Japan’s first airport.

Between 1898 and 1935, he made 22 trips to Europe, and attended 68 international conferences. He was a member, along with Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, of the Committee for the Promotion of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, and met frequently with Wilhelm Roentgen, the discoverer of X-rays, with whom he formed a particularly close relationship.

Tanakadati, who served in the House of Representatives from 1925 until 1947, was closely involved in the military’s uses of aviation. In January 1933, he read a lecture on the development of aviation in the presence of Emperor Hirohito, describing this experience later as “the most memorable experience of my life.”

I stumbled upon an article that mentions him in the February 9, 1944, issue of the New Zealand daily, Gisborne Herald. Under the heading “Japanese Claim: New Secret Weapon” it states that Tanakadate “informed Parliament about the scientific development of Japanese secret weapons, declaring that successful experiments were being conducted with a certain powerful component that would instantly destroy the entire British Navy.”

This element was undoubtedly uranium, although work on an atomic bomb in Japan was not far from Earth.

His collaborations with the military have been criticized by some people, among them his friend and colleague, the physicist Hantaro Nagaoka, whose theory of the planetary model of the atom with a massive nucleus was confirmed by Ernest Rutherford.

Tanakadit remained in Tokyo for most of the war, but was evacuated to his home in Nino, at the time of the intense bombing of the capital in March 1945. His home was destroyed in those raids. He stayed in Ninohi after the war and traveled to Tokyo to attend conferences and the like.

He was a unique and peculiar scientific genius, a pioneer in many types of fieldwork, research and development, and a prolific reporter with a group of world-famous scientists. I imagine him, alone, in one of his poems titled “Deep in the Mountains”: “When I hit my typewriter keys / I can’t blame people for their thinking / There is woodpecker around me.”

He was quoted as saying: “With scientific developments, the day will come when we can reduce the damage caused by natural enemies: earthquakes, storms and tsunamis.”

Tanakadet, who died in 1952 at the age of 95, also left us these words to our children: “Do not be biased, do not eat, grow up healthy and become a child who loves science.”

I think we can all support this advice.

Roger Bullvers has written extensively about Japan. His most recent book is The Charter: And Thirteen Other Stories of Japan.

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