On March 11, 2011, North Japan along the Pacific coast was afflicted by the disasters of a large earthquake and tsunami. Even now, people have still not rebuilt everything in the area. Japanese people have a saying “Disasters come when all people forget”. This aphorism is said to have been introduced by Torahiko TERADA (寺田 寅彦, 1878–1935), though he is not known actually to have said it or written it. TERADA was a Japanese physicist and author, a professor of physics at Tokyo Imperial University working at the Earthquake Research Institute on a wide range of topics in physics.

As an author, Terada is best known for his numerous essays on a wide variety of topics, ranging from science to cinema, and haiku to cartoons. He studied under Sōseki NATSUME (夏目 漱石1867–1916).

Soseki is often considered to be the foremost Japanese novelist of the Meiji Period (1868–1912). (People always call him Soseki, not Natsume.) He is best known for his novels Sanshiro, Botchan, I Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. He was also a student of English literature and composer of haiku. From 1984 to 2004, his portrait was on the Japanese 1000 yen note. In Japan, he is often considered the greatest writer of modern Japanese history and has had a profound effect on almost all important subsequent Japanese writers.

For Terada, Soseki was at first a teacher of English at the high school in Kumamoto but he remained one of Soseki’s students throughout his life. Terada appeared in Soseki’s novel Sanshiro as the teacher of physics, and on I Am a Cat as a student of the cat’s owner.

When Terada got to know about Continental Drift Theory, he was greatly impressed and became interested in geophysics. He studied earthquake mechanisms and wrote many essays on natural disasters. His students all became devotees of Wegener’s theory. Sakuhei FUJIWARA (1884–1950), whose work was quoted in the Wegener’s book, was one of Tarada’s students. But among Japanese geologists more widely, Wegener’s theory was not accepted, largely because the influential geologist Hisakatsu YABE (1878–1969) rejected the theory. (But he was a palaeontologist!)