Honshu, Kobe and the Disaster in Japan

Japan's economy has been on a cyclical roller coaster starting with the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese economic challenge in the 1980s, through the asset price bubble from 1986 to 1991, and continuining with the current earth quake near the coast of Honshu, Japan.

The first graphic on the left, from the USGS, shows the main shock and aftershocks. The second graph of the 1995 Kobe earthquake shows that Japan sits at the intersection of three tectonic plates, the Pacific Plate, the Philippine Plate and the Eurasian Plate. What is of particular concern is that the Honshu quake might have destabilized the Philippine Plate and made it more earthquake prone.

The concern is that the world's largest city, Tokyo, sits at the intersection of these three plates.