UM TO FUKUSHIMA

Yuichi Ebina shows how science and the humanities meet at Tohoku University’s Disaster Research Center. The associate professor at Tohoku University looks to the past to find the relationship between humans and historical disasters. He deciphers documents and old maps from the Edo period of Japan. Ebina is involved in preserving historical texts that may shed light on past tsunamis. Here he shows paper pasted onto a doorway around 200 years ago. He will delicately pull it apart to look for personal tales of disaster and compare those writings with scientific findings. The goal is to create a more complete picture of past tsunamis through physical evidence and first-hand accounts.

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Photos and text by Parker Seibold